Apple. Celery. Green beans. Avocado. Lists are commonplace in human culture, oral and written, ancient and modern. Despite their ubiquity, their function and meaning vary. Take for example the list above. Is it a grocery list for shopping? Green things for counting? Rotting food in the fridge? As O. Tribulato states in the volume under consideration, ‘lists need a “reading methodology” to be meaningful: they are not definite, but potential texts’ (p. 180). Thankfully, this volume provides a thorough, comparativist and wide-ranging treatment of lists, catalogues and enumerations in ancient literature that helps to get a better sense of the affordances of lists and causes for their perdurance in differing contexts.
The collection of essays is organised into four parts. After a synoptic introduction, the first section, ‘Theoretical Approaches to Lists and Catalogues’, provides two bird's-eye views on lists. S. Mainberger's delightful omphaloskepsis analyses the book's table of contents and names the basic problem: does the meaning of a list lie in an accumulation of semantics, the syntax of its parts, its rhetorical situation (we would not dare subsume titles of contributions under an ‘etc.’ [p. 31]) or its exegesis? E. von Contzen surveys answers from the fields of anthropology, literary criticism and aesthetics, which treat lists as a constant, simple or discursive form, mode and experience. The latter, with its clear attempt at a ‘listology’, is particularly helpful for the beginner. From these emerge a quadripartite aspect to lists. They structure language, contain semantic content, occupy a site and serve a function.
Part 2, ‘The Cultural Poetics of Enumeration: Contexts, Materiality, Organisation’, treats non-epic or sometimes para-literary and religious lists. N. Wasserman recounts a variety of lists found in Akkadian literature according to their organising principles such as a series of non-related vs related things; these include lexica (e.g. of types of ploughs), mountains, lament, incantations, names (e.g. of Marduk) and others. C. Delattre considers Greek mythographic lists, especially but not exclusively those in response to Hesiod, whose organisation, punctuation (or lack thereof) and hyper-/inter-/trans-textuality suggests that ‘we should perhaps edit these texts as they were intended: they were not read, but consulted’ (p. 106). R. Gordon's chapter on the performativity of lists in Roman curses finds affordances as well as constraints; lists were ideal for the cataloguing of targets for curses, be they individuals, body-parts or otherwise, but they ‘excluded a great deal of circumstantial knowledge – the usually complex and entangled justificatory narrative’ (p. 127) for the curse. In the following chapter O. Thomas offers close readings of several attribute-lists in Greek hymns and their contribution to charis (‘favour/thankfulness’) between gods and humans with enriching results: for example, the possibility that metrical lists such as Anthologia Palatina 9.525 provided a grid-like structure that allowed for not just sequential but also ‘vertical reading’ between its constituents (p. 155). Tribulato deals with the Antiatticist lexicon and how it exploited the encyclopaedic form to argue for a capacious koine Greek.
Part 3, ‘The Poetics of the Epic Catalogue’, works through catalogues in Greek and Latin epic, with some comparative stops at Akkadian, Linear B and prose. E. Visser typologises epic catalogues into strict lists of names, such as those killed in Iliadic aristeiai, ‘Catalogue of Ships’ and Linear B tablets (e.g. PY An 657), and looser lists with itemised expansions of individual entries, such as the catalogue of heroines in the nekuia of the Odyssey (11.235–327). J. Haubold exploits the affordances of catalogues as formal structures to compare the rhetoric of listed names and places in Greek and Akkadian epic, especially the Epic of Gilgamesh, and finds telling differences, such as where ‘Homer (in the Odyssey) captures the vivid surfaces of the world, while the Gilgamesh Epic invites us to chart inner progress’ (p. 224). C. Reitz identifies several ‘generic consistencies and inconsistencies’ (p. 237) in epic catalogues, with ‘invocation and divine responsibility, order, exactitude on the one hand; shifting numbers, incompleteness, indefinite and innumerable dimensions on the other’ (p. 241). S. Kyriakidis contrasts the use of genealogical catalogues in the Iliad, the Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, the last of which rejects the explicit value placed on familial lists (p. 277). Wesselmann reads epic catalogues for their comic potential in mismatching the appropriateness of the form and content, such as the list of Zeus's lovers in Iliad 14.313–28 (though more comparisons with, e.g., Old Comedy may have clarified an emic concept of comedy).
Part 4, ‘Beyond the Epic Catalogue: Literary Appropriations of Lists and Catalogues’, ventures away from the origins of the ‘distinctly epic form’ of catalogue (p. 305) to tragedy, comedy, elegiacs and ekphrasis. B. Sammons's journey through catalogues in Greek tragedy finds their transformation into ‘a tool for description’ (p. 323) especially adept for the messengers and even dialogic reconstruction of events. At the heart of I. Ruffell's chapter is a close reading of all lists in Aristophanes’ Archarnians, which turns up numerous functions in context, including reinforcing central conceptual metaphors (p. 352); other comedians, such as Hermippos, catalogue in order to parody epic. Likewise, Scheidegger Laemmle focuses on lists in a single work, Ovid's Ex Ponto 4.16, and finds them useful for reflecting on the exiled Ovid's temporality in ‘the most informative account of contemporary literature that we have from classical antiquity’ (p. 392). R. Höschele similarly centres on the function of lists in Christodoros’ Ekphrasis, which primarily serve to recreate the serial viewing of the statues and to structure an intertextual relationship with the Iliadic teichoskopia (p. 416).
The volume is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning interest in lists, catalogues, inventories and enumerations in antiquity. Its comparativist breadth is a value that complements recent monographs on the subject, such as A. Riggsby's Mosaics of Knowledge: Representing Information in the Roman World (2019) and most prominently A. Kirk's Ancient Greek Lists (2021). At times it is a bit too repetitive (e.g. lengthy text quoted twice on pp. 67 and 75) or not quite enough. There is opportunity for more cross-referencing, for example, between the chapters on comedy, two Akkadian chapters and observations on the simple lists of epic (such as of the Nereids in Iliad 18) and later expansion (p. 323 ~ pp. 197–210). But increased conversation between contributions is always a desideratum for edited volumes – perhaps only realisable live in the conference format. That said, the collection is a success and brings many of the unacknowledged and underappreciated aspects of ancients lists into the larger discussion on the roles and functions of textual form.
