300 Philip Kaplan
and the number of ships they provided. Ethnonyms are sometimes omitted, the Cata-
logue using instead the formula “they who hold...” or “those who dwell in,”vel sim.as
with “they who hold Athens.” It is clear that this is poetic variation, as when “the men
who hold Arkadia” (603) is followed by “the Arkadians” (611), and Tlepolemos who led
“from Rhodes nine ships of haughty Rhodians” (654). The Trojan Catalogue follows a
similar formula (2.816–877), although without providing numbers of men; ethnonyms
are scarcer, and there are fewer geographical details, but place remains the primary means
of identifying the peoples being led to battle. The prominence of toponymic and topo-
logical detail demonstrates that the contingents are distinguished and recognized by
their geographic location, rather than by genealogical or cultural markers of ethnicity
(compare this to Herodotus’ catalogue of Xerxes’ army [7.61–96], in which the contin-
gents are presented in some geographical order, but they are distinguished by their dress
and military equipment). In both cases, the lists themselves demonstrate a rudimentary
organization of lands, but little indication of the relations of peoples, beyond the very
imprecise labels of “Achaians,” “Argives,” “Danaans,” and “Trojans” used throughout
the poem.
While the identification of land and people is very strong in Homer, their connection
is by and large implicitly accepted without elaboration; the poems have little interest in
questions of communal identity, or the relation of such communities to the territories
they occupy. Even in theOdyssey, which displays the beginnings of an interest in the
notion of difference among peoples, and of their positions in the world traversed by the
hero (see Dougherty 2001), there are only the faintest hints of interest in the origins
of such peoples, and of how they might be shaped by their lands—the Lotos-Eaters, for
example, whose lethargy is produced by the food that their land uniquely produces, or
the Phaeacians, whose city was founded by their king, and whose seafaring ways are a
product of their remote island location.
The attempt to understand the connection of land and people began with genealogical
mythography. The notion of a common ancestry is a central element in conceptions of
ethnic identity at multiple levels. To the Greeks, as to other peoples, this common ances-
try is expressed in the genealogies preserved in the mythographic tradition, which goes
back at least as far as Hesiod. Hall (1997) has argued that, in the Archaic Period if not
earlier, genealogical trees were developed as part of the aggregative construction of eth-
nic identities within Greece, particularly for the Dorians and Ionians, and ultimately for
the Hellenicethnos(Hall 2002). Malkin, on the other hand, prefers to see the mapping
of relationships between human groups in terms of descent from mythological family
trees as a later development, generated from scholarly interest in mythography (2001:
9–12). Whichever is the case, these genealogies also functioned to explain the origins and
relationships of geographical features as well—which Malkin terms “land genealogies”
(Malkin 1994: 15–7, 20–1). An early example of this phenomenon is Hesiod’s presen-
tation of the daughters of Ocean by Tethys as a list of rivers (Theog. 337–345). The list
is not in any spatial order, and no particular physical relationship is implied, although
Herodotus suggests that some earlier thinkers, perhaps following Hesiod, believed that
the Nile arose in the Ocean (2.21; cf. 23). Later mythographers elided ethnical and geo-
graphical genealogy: for example, Hellanicus makes Lakedaimon the son of Zeus and the
Pleiad Taygete (FrGrHist 4 F 19a, schol. AIliad18.486; Pearson 1939: 177). It is not
clear whether Lakedaimon is the ancestor of the people or the region; but his descent