Catalogue of Women - Date, Composition and Authorship

Date, Composition and Authorship

During antiquity the Catalogue was almost universally considered the work of Hesiod. Pausanias reports, however, that the Boeotians living around Mount Helicon during his day believed that the only genuine Hesiodic poem was the Works and Days and that even the first 10 lines of that poem (the Hymn to Zeus) were spurious. The only other expression of doubt that has survived is found in Aelian, who cites "Hesiod" for the number of Niobe's children, but qualifies his citation with "unless these verses are not by Hesiod, but have been passed off falsely as his, like many other passages." But Aelian's skepticism could have stemmed from the still common belief that Hesiodic poetry suffered from interpolation, and it is impossible to tell whether he regarded the entire Catalogue as spurious or not. These two passages are, in any event, isolated, and more discerning critics like Apollonius of Rhodes, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Crates of Mallus apparently found no reason to doubt the attribution to Hesiod, going so far as to cite the Catalogue in arguments concerning the content and authenticity of other Hesiodic poems.

Modern scholars have not shared the confidence of their Hellenistic counterparts, and today the Catalogue is generally considered to be a post-Hesiodic composition. Since Hesiod is supposed to have lived around the turn of the 7th century, the Cyrene-Ehoie alone could guarantee that the poem was not his. Richard Janko's survey of epic language suggests that the Catalogue is very early, perhaps contemporary with Hesiod's Theogony.

Martin West argues on poetic, linguistic, cultural and political grounds that an Athenian poet "compiled the Catalogue of Women and attached it to Hesiod's Theogony, as if it were all Hesiodic," sometime between 580 and 520, and thinks it possible that this range might be narrowed to the period following 540. He sees, for example, the marriage of Xuthus to a daughter of Erechtheus as a means of subordinating all of Ionia to Athens, since their union produced the eponym Ion. Similarly, Sicyon is made a son of Erechtheus (fr. 224), which West takes as a reflection of the tyrant Cleisthenes of Sicyon's attempts to promote Ionian–Athenian interests in the polis, which had traditionally been more closely connected to Dorian Argos. This and other considerations would, in West's view, establish a terminus post quem of c. 575, but he prefers a later dating on the assumption that Theogony 965–1020, which he assigns to the latter portion of the 6th century, was contemporaneous with the composition of the Catalogue.

West's arguments have been highly influential, but other scholars have arrived at different conclusions using the same evidence. Fowler thinks that the Sicyon's genealogy would more likely reflect a composition before Cleisthenes' death c. 575) and dates the poem to the period closely following the First Sacred War, connecting its content to the growing influence of the Amphictyonic League and placing its author in Aeolian Thessaly because of the Aeolid family-trees centered around that region which dominate the earlier portions of the poem. Hirschberger, on the other hand, takes this focus upon the Aeolids and the Catalogue poet's perceived interest in eastern peoples to be indicative of a poet from Aeolis in Asia Minor, and proposes that the Catalogue was composed there between 630 and 590, viewing an apparent allusion to the poem by Stesichorus (died c. 555) as the ultimate terminus ante quem. Other dates have been proposed: Jacques Schwartz thought that the poem reached its final form between 506 and 476.