Homer, Iliad 2.484–759 and 2.816–877
ΚΑΤΑΛΟΓΟΣ ΤΩΝ ΝΕΩΝ
The Catalogue of Ships
Who led the army to Troy, where each people came from, and how many ships they brought.
In the second book of the Iliad, nine years into the war and before the first battle of the poem, Homer calls on the Muses and names the army that sailed to Troy: each people, its leaders, its towns and its ships. The list runs to 266 lines (2.494–759): 29 contingents under 46 leaders, 1,186 ships, from about 190 places. It begins with the Boeotians, who gathered the fleet at Aulis, goes round central Greece and the Peloponnese, across to Ithaca and Aetolia in the west, to Crete and the Dodecanese, and ends in Thessaly.
A shorter list of the other side follows (2.816–877): the Trojans and their allies, sixteen peoples from Thrace and Paeonia to Paphlagonia, Caria and Lycia, with their leaders and towns but no numbers.
This page records both: every place on one map, every contingent with its leaders and ships, and the whole text in Greek and English, line by line, with a reading of it in reconstructed ancient Greek.
Every place in the Catalogue
Gold, the Achaeans; red, the Trojans and their allies. A dot is a site located with confidence; a dashed ring is a site uncertain or disputed, or the land of a people. Click a place for its picture and the line that names it.
places have no known site and are not on the map:
The contingents
In the order of the Catalogue. Click a people to read its lines, or ⌖ to see its places on the map.
The Achaeans
The Trojans and their allies
The ships
Agamemnon brought 100 ships; Nireus brought 3. The ships of the 29 contingents, in the order of the Catalogue.
The 29 contingents bring 1,186 ships in all, about 41 each. Six bring more than 50: Agamemnon 100, Nestor 90, Diomedes and Idomeneus 80 each, Menelaus and the Arcadians 60 each, the Arcadians in ships that Agamemnon gave them, “for with matters of seafaring had they naught to do”. The smallest are Philoctetes’ 7 and the 3 of Nireus, “the comeliest man that came beneath Ilios of all the Danaans after the fearless son of Peleus”.
Homer gives the crews twice: 120 young men in each Boeotian ship (2.510) and 50 rowers in each of Philoctetes’ seven (2.719–720). Thucydides (1.10), who rounds the fleet to 1,200 ships, suggests taking the mean of the two: about 85 men a ship, which for 1,186 ships makes some 100,000 men. The Trojans and their allies are given no numbers at all.
The text, entry by entry
The Greek of Monro and Allen, with A. T. Murray’s translation (1924), line by line. Open an entry to read it; click a place to find it on the map.
Hear it read
The whole Catalogue, with the invocation and the Trojans, read in reconstructed ancient Greek (27 minutes), with the Greek and an English translation on screen and each place shown as it is named.
The voice is Nicola (Kokoro, through AoidosVoice), in the reconstructed pronunciation of W. S. Allen’s Vox Graeca, with the pitch accent; all 338 lines were checked against the metre. The music is for the phorminx, the singer’s lyre, in the Dorian harmonia of the enharmonic genus. Pictures from Wikimedia Commons, credited on screen.
Sources and credits
- Greek text: Homer, Iliad, ed. D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen (Oxford Classical Texts, 3rd ed., 1920), from the Perseus Digital Library (CC BY-SA).
- English: A. T. Murray, Homer: The Iliad (Loeb Classical Library, 1924), public domain, from Perseus, divided at the verse ends.
- Places: Pleiades (CC BY). Of the 228 places, are located with confidence, are uncertain or disputed, and have no known site. Where a site follows an ancient identification, chiefly Strabo’s or Pausanias’, the note says so.
- Relief: Terrain Tiles on AWS (Tilezen): EU-DEM (Copernicus), SRTM and GMTED2010 (U.S. Geological Survey), ETOPO1 (NOAA). The coasts are today’s.
- Pictures: Wikimedia Commons, listed below with their authors and licences. Pictures under CC BY-SA are shared here under the same licence.
- Earlier work: Mapping the Catalogue of Ships, by Jenny Strauss Clay, Courtney Evans and Ben Jasnow with the Scholars’ Lab of the University of Virginia, which maps the Catalogue as a route through the landscape.
Downloads
- catalogue_places.csv: the 228 places, with their Greek and English names, entries and lines, status, position and notes
- catalogue_entries.csv: the 45 entries, with their leaders, ships and places
- catalogue_text.csv: the 338 lines, Greek and English (the Greek under Perseus’s CC BY-SA)
- catalogue_of_ships.json: all of the above