The Introduction presents the central questions and motivations of the book: why do Greek lists exist in such abundance, what are their purposes, and how do we trace their trajectory through and across the genres and text-types of the late archaic and Classical periods? How do literary and documentary texts intersect in this tradition? How, finally, does this widespread cultural phenomenon inform the post-Classical inventories and archival traditions we see in such abundance? As a grounding and point of departure, it provides a brief survey of lists and their manifestations in Greek literature and inscriptions. It turns then to definitions of lists, precursors to Greek alphabetic lists, and theoretical preliminaries, including: the connections of lists and literacy, orality, and numeracy, and lists’ relationship to memory, narrative, counting, and collecting.Finally, the Introduction establishes an original framework for the functions of Greek lists, to be explored and examined in the main body chapters of the book: Greek lists, I propose, serve to perform a spectrum of actions upon objects: they collect, count, control, display, distort, memorialize, and, finally, conjure them.

Chapter 1 argues that the list in Homer serves as a mode of counting and establishing authoritative standards of numeration. In the pre-coinage context of the Homeric poems, authors and speakers use lists to project authority and accountability to an audience; the poet himself, moreover, emerges as the ultimate meta-counter. More than a literary device, catalogues of objects in Homer allow for the comparison, valuation, and trade of items in the absence of other standards of measurement. Finally, drawing on Eco’s conception of the list as “potentially infinite,” I suggest further that these sets of texts engage in a paradoxical and deliberately obfuscating practice of presenting their contents as uncountably large.

The disseminated talk, unverifiable talk, portentous talk, rhymes, chen prophecies, prophetic rhymes, political myths, and popular legends during the early imperia period in China were all rumors or rumor-like expressions (hereafter referred to as rumor-type expressions). The origins of rumor-type expressions of the early imperial period were usually hard-to-trace information sources such as hearsay, legends, and folk stories. They were spread primarily through unofficial and non-mainstream interpersonal networks, with oral transmission as the main mode of circulation, supplemented by the written word. Their contents often involved curses, commentary, speculation, the weird and absurd, and strange portents. While the information they carried might not have been approved or verified by authoritative channels, they were not necessarily fabrications and falsehoods. In terms of linguistic expression, they were unclear, ambiguous, and amenable to multiple definitions and interpretations. Rumor-type expressions played an important role in politics and society during the early imperial period.

“Portentous talk” (yāoyán), like disseminated talk and unverifiable talk, was a common speech tag in traditional Chinese political and social life. Compared with the latter two, portentous talk was especially loathed by rulers throughout the ages. In the course of more than 2,000 years, successive governments had done quite a good job of stigmatizing portentous talk. To most scholar-officials and the general public, portentous talk represented negative information that was grotesque, macabre, dangerous, and untrustworthy. In Modern Standard Chinese, disseminated talk and unverifiable talk are defined as falsities, fallacies, absurdities, and superstitions; hearsay that is not based on facts; information that is fabricated, which can be readily used by persons with ulterior motives to mislead and fool the people. Even as disseminated talk and unverifiable talk are seen as “rumors,” portentous talk is defined as “heresy that baffles,”1 “exceedingly strange heresy,”2 “nonsense, lies,” and “heresy, talk that confuses people’s hearts.”3 Portentous talk is also a manifestation of rumor. This chapter attempts to acquire a fuller and deeper understanding of portentous talk during the early imperial period, as well as the political and social roles it played, by examining and interpreting the occurrences and contexts of portentous talk in historical texts.

This chapter introduces the book and the questions which it asks: how individuals took part in the Panathenaia, why participating in these festivities called ‘all-Athenian’ was so important and how doing so created identities for the individuals and groups involved. It provides some basic information about the celebration and its history, as well as a discussion of previous scholarship. Then it introduces some key concepts and approaches used in the study: the importance of sacrifice, ritual and community and the ways in which social identities are created for individuals and groups. It discusses problems of the evidence for the Panathenaia, and it ends with a summary of the overall monograph.

Chapter 5 advances the argument comedies of Aristophanes to consciously draw on the poetics of both literary and administrative catalogues. The plays contain lists that parody the archaic poetic catalogue tradition; meanwhile, in various scenarios, Aristophanic characters display a preoccupation with the listing-behaviors we have already begun to outline: counting, valuation, quantifying, and establishing authority. The comedies thus represent a deep integration of the literary and administrative spheres through their use of the inventory.

In the writings of the pre-Qin and early imperial periods, the character yáo in the Chinese word for rumors (yáoyán) originally referred to songs and rhymes that circulated among the common people.1

Chapter 6 examines aspects of the reception of catalogue in early Hellenistic poetry, focusing on Callimachus and Hermesianax. These poets, I argue, exploit catalogue as a non-mimetic form, using it to defy traditional ways of counting, and traditional orderings and boundaries of space and time. In their hands, the catalogue poem becomes a locus of disorder and fantasy.