On what occasions was the Catalogue of Women performed? What might it have meant for the audiences for whom it was performed? These are questions for which there is no scholarly consensus: the tattered state of this once monumental and influential poem seems to have warded off most attempts at sustained speculation. These questions invite no conclusive answers, but nor are they the kind that will or should go away, and at the outset I would like to acknowledge the speculative nature of the conclusions this article will draw about locating the Catalogue in its wider archaic cultural context. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate an aspect of the Catalogue that has not been fully appreciated, its strong intertextual relationship with sympotic poetry, and to pursue the possible consequences – social, political and performative – of this intertextuality.

Given that the symposium has dominated studies of the politics and poetics of archaic Greece for the last two decades, it might have seemed inevitable for a sympotic reading of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women to emerge. That it has not seems due to the fact that more obvious attributes of the Catalogue have destined it for other contexts of analysis: that of oral-formulaic poetry, the natural comparandum for an archaic hexameter poem. In what follows, I by no means deny the appropriateness of such comparisons; on the contrary, they are where we must begin; but with a poem like the Catalogue, very much sui generis, it is important to consider the possibility of multiple influences and generic fusion.