This chapter is the first of four chapters focused on the penteteric or Great Panathenaia, which took place every four years. It looks at how individuals participated in the procession, which conveyed the sacrificial animals, the peplos and other offerings to the Akropolis, and the sacrifices to Athena. The procession and attendant rituals included a multitude of different roles for various individuals and groups: Athenians, both male and female, were certainly represented, but so were other inhabitants, the metics and their daughters and delegations from the colonies and, in the later fifth century BC, the allies. Together, they made up the community of ‘all the Athenians’, who were celebrating the goddess and her deed against the Giants. These rituals repeated the festival’s stories and themes, which unified the rituals and linked them to the games.

The Conclusion and Epilogue gesture toward the listed dynamics of counting and materialization in later texts through the brief examples of the Parian Marble and Lindian Chronicle. These monumental inscribed text-objects can be understood as literal transformations of cultural value into list form, extreme inventories untethered from their contents.

Chapter 2 explores the poetics of epic catalogue in the best evidence we have for the archaic catalogue poem, the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. While Greek lists in some instances impart official value to a collection of objects, this chapter explores the idea of the catalogue as a mode of gendered control and a marker of loss. Alongside the Odyssean catalogue of women in the Nekuia and Semonides catalogue of women, we can read the genre of woman-catalogue more generally as an attempt to typologize and collapse the individuality of women, all the while treating them as objects similar to any saleable prestige item.

Chapter 4 treats the genre of the epigraphic inventory within the context of earlier Greek literature. It argues through detailed re-examination of these enigmatic texts that they are calculated in their layout and design to “display” and “replace” the dedications in their store for the viewers of the text. Moreover, whether or not they serve as ongoing useful records for the officials involved, they allow both the polis administration and the public to grapple with multiple forms of deterioration and loss.

This chapter focuses on the identities created for other residents (Athenian women and girls, male metics and their daughters and Athenian boys, beardless youths and ephebes) and non-residents (especially colonies and allies). In comparison to those of the male Athenians, the identities of other residents and non-residents of the city were not nearly as complex, in part because these other groups had limited opportunities for participation in the celebration. While the identities of Athenian boys, beardless youths and ephebes focused on their position as citizens-to-be or as the newest citizens who were prepared to fight for the city, the identities for the other groups focused on their service to the goddess. The participation of both non-residents and residents also marked them as members of the community of “all the Athenians” and allowed them to create identities as members of this group. International visitors had a significant role to play as excluded non-members who contrasted with members of the community. Thus, how one took part in the Great Panathenaia was instrumental in determining what it meant to be a member of “all the Athenians” who were celebrating the Great Panathenaia.

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.