The beginning and end of theCatalogue of Womenand its relation to Hesiod

Abstract

The discovery of the extensive proem to the Catalogue in a papyrus published in 1956 revived the old question of the relation between the Ehoiai and the rest of the Hesiodic corpus. While the authenticity of the Catalogue and its attribution to Hesiod were widely accepted in antiquity, modern philologists have reached no consensus on its genuineness or its date. As so often in such controversies, supposedly ‘objective’ criteria – linguistic, stylistic, and historical evidence – have been invoked to argue both for and against Hesiodic authorship. But these criteria too have changed as our knowledge of archaic Greece has evolved and expanded. Recently, Drager, on historical grounds, and Arrighetti, on literary ones, have argued for genuineness. Stylistic arguments are, as we all know, notoriously subjective: if the Theogony and the Works and Days were not traditionally ascribed to one author, would most scholars have done so? Often, the rejection of Hesiodic authorship for the Catalogue derives from an unspoken premise: if Hesiod's poetry constitutes an implicit polemic against heroic epic, then we should not assign to Hesiod a composition dealing with the heroic tradition, far less one that attempts to give an exhaustive account of the heroic age from beginning to end. But such an antagonism to heroic epic is a scholarly invention, arising, as I have argued elsewhere, from a misinterpretation of the Theogony 's proem.