Chapter 3 treats Herodotus’ use of the catalogue and the general problem of quantifying goods on a large cultural scale, as well as the specific use of the list as a cipher for imparting value. In the Histories, I argue, the genre of historiography and the nascent administrative inventory tradition coalesce. We find multiple examples of lists used to prove points and express value, and the characters and audience of the Histories, deeply invested in quantifying and displaying their wealth and possessions, use the list format to enact and prove their own worth. Meanwhile, Herodotus’ use of the term apodeixis for his work — also the technical word for an inscribed inventory — reveals that he conceives of his project as a grand multimedia catalogue of everything of importance to the Greek world. He has transferred the discrete uses of lists available to him to his own new type of text, thus incorporating old forms while distinguishing the Histories from previous genealogical works.

Chapter 1 argues that the list in Homer serves as a mode of counting and establishing authoritative standards of numeration. In the pre-coinage context of the Homeric poems, authors and speakers use lists to project authority and accountability to an audience; the poet himself, moreover, emerges as the ultimate meta-counter. More than a literary device, catalogues of objects in Homer allow for the comparison, valuation, and trade of items in the absence of other standards of measurement. Finally, drawing on Eco’s conception of the list as “potentially infinite,” I suggest further that these sets of texts engage in a paradoxical and deliberately obfuscating practice of presenting their contents as uncountably large.