Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece by Kirk OrmandAndromache KaranikaKirk Ormand. The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 265 pp. Cloth, $90.The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a text in fragmentary form that poses questions about its date, performance, and genre context, is put in new light in the rigorous study by Kirk Ormand, who traces the main themes and mythological details of the Catalogue’s intriguing storytelling. With the external façade of a recounting poem largely connected to heroic genealogies, the Catalogue has attracted significant scholarly attention. Ormand breaks new ground by focusing consistently throughout his book not solely on matters of poetic production but rather on the “end result” and the social forces that produced and proliferated the poem. The key themes of contest, rape, marriage, and changes in the institution of marriage become the template on which the mythological structure of heroic genealogies is set. Ormand sees them not as a static platform but as the moving axis that problematizes female roles as women change home and status. The Catalogue presents largely the consumption of women without ever presenting a female point of view; the female figures are tools in creating heroic genealogies with the birth of the hero as a focal point without much interest in further births or other moments of the female life. As becomes clear from the first introductory chapter, Ormand assumes an authorial stance that is well aware of the oral hexametric epic tradition but is also consciously creating an act of aristocratic nostalgia of the past in the new political frame of the polis.The second chapter delves into much-needed research on the socioeconomic exchange of hedna, a practice often conflated with dowry and aristocratic wedding gift exchange. Ormand carefully disentangles the literary attestations and underlines how hedna was a marker of aristocratic values distinct from other forms of gifts. Influenced by Ian Morris’ view that oral poetry reflects social practices at the times of performance that resonate with audiences, Ormand brings a new understanding of hedna not as economic exchange in a bride-wealth social nexus (according to the anthropological work of Jack Goody) but rather as something that ensures a kind of membership, so to speak, in an aristocratic club. Functioning like a hidden auction, the offering of hedna creates a competitive framework that silently raises the price of aristocratic membership. Displaying and offering more wealth ensures belonging to the elite but also defines the measure that marks and solidifies aristocratic status while raising the bar for others. Marriage offers the forum of competition, and the bride becomes a marker of value (through her beauty) that enables such a kind of gift-giving, and, through it, belonging to the elite. By exploring the historical context and literary attestations of this type [End Page 171] of gift exchange, Ormand presents a convincing case that the Catalogue, an epic poem that can be largely seen functioning as a counterpart of sympotic poetry, has a similar role: within the early context of the rising polis it provides an elite ideology connecting aristocrats to heroes through the nexus of the poetic (undemocratic) device of hedna.In chapter 3, Ormand’s analysis of the story of Mestra, a well-known shape shifter in myth, lucidly illustrates his arguments about elite ideology and how marriage defines female identity in the narrative of the Catalogue. Connections between the female and mobility are of course not new, but Ormand brings a new point of view to a central issue in archaic and classical literature, namely, the implicit struggle between natal and spousal families for the woman (as in the myths of Demeter and Persephone, the Danaids, Antigone, and Electra, among others). In the Hesiodic narrative of Mestra, her shape-shifting and passage from rape to marriage exemplify social tensions and the evolution of social and legal thinking on citizenship, endogamy, and exogamy and ultimately the oikos as a unit of the polis.The fourth chapter shifts toward the fluidity in oral poetic production and culminates in a parallel reading of Atalanta’s race with Hippomenes as a recasting of the...