Transmission and Reconstruction
It is impossible to tell exactly when the last complete copy of the Catalogue was lost. Fragments of over fifty ancient copies have been found, dating from the Hellenistic period through early Byzantine times. A book label from the century or so after the latest Catalogue papyrus lists the contents of a 5th or 6th century Hesiodic codex as "Hesiod's Theogony, Works and Days and Shield", and it appears that by about this time the Byzantine triad of Hesiod's works had become the notional corpus, to the detriment of the other poems which had traveled under the poet's name. Knowledge of the Catalogue did not cease altogether with the loss of the final complete copy, however, and well into medieval times authors such as Eustathius and Tzetzes could cite the poem via fragments contained in other ancient authors. Other vestiges of the poem's influence are less clear: the Pseudo-Apollodoran Bibliotheca, an early Roman-era handbook of Greek mythology, for example, is widely believed to have taken the Catalogue as its primary structural model, although this is not stated explicitly within that text.
The collection and interpretation of the Hesiodic fragments in the modern era began during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily with the editions of Heinsius (1603) and Graevius (1667). The earliest collections simply presented ancient quotations organized by the quoting author, and it was not until the work of Lehmann (1828), Goettling (1831) and Marckscheffel (1840) that attempts at a proper reconstruction began. Marckscheffel was the first to recognize that the early portions of the poem treated the descendants of Deucalion in a systematic fashion, but he regarded the "Catalogue of Women" and "Ehoiai" as two initially separate works that had been joined: the former was genealogically structured, while the latter, in Marckscheffel's view, simply recounted myths involving notable Thessalian and Boeotian heroines, with each introduced by the ē' hoiē-formula. Since the Ehoie of Alcmene was attested for book 4, Marckscheffel proposed that books 1–3 were the "Catalogue", and books 4 and 5 were the "Ehoiai". As the 19th century progressed, there were several other important observations about the genealogical structure of the Catalogue. In 1860 Adolf Kirchhoff noted the mass of information connected to the family of Io, a stemma which could be assigned to the third book because of an ancient citation placing Phineus, one of her descendents, there. The picture of the Catalogue that was emerging began to resemble the Bibliotheca in structure, but Theodor Bergk was the first to suggest explicitly (though in passing) that the poem might be reconstructed with the help of the mythographic work. Bergk and his contemporaries still largely followed Marckscheffel's conclusion that the Catalogue and Ehoiai were semi-distinct texts, and it was not until 1894 that Friedrich Leo finally demonstrated that these were in fact alternate titles for a single poem.
A few years before Leo's paper, the first small papyrus fragment was found, and the first half of the 20th century would see the publication of several other pieces which added significantly to the modern text of the Catalogue. Among these finds were important passages—the Catalogue of Suitors and Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis, for example—, but few advanced the modern understanding of the work's overall structure. The appearance of the proem in 1956 actually led to a major misapprehension, for the list of gods found therein, beginning with Zeus and proceeding through the divine Heracles, led some to believe that the Catalogue was not organized in a strictly genealogical manner, but presented the unions of gods and heroines organized to some extent by amorous deity. Six years later, with the publication of the 28th part of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the corpus of papyrus witnesses to the fragmentary Hesiodic poems was nearly doubled, with the lion's share of these new texts belonging to the Catalogue. The new papyri not only proved once and for all that the poem was organized by genealogies of the great families in a way similar to the Bibliotheca, it also showed that the poet's use of the ē' hoiē-formula was not a random method of introduction, but an organizing tool within an overall structure.
Read more about this topic: Catalogue Of Women