All that we possess of Hesiod's Catalogue of Women is shreds and tatters. The vast majority of what survives does so on papyri where there are barely two consecutive lines which can be read without resorting to some sort of restoration. The small proportion of surviving fragments which derive from ancient quotation give, at best, just half a dozen consecutive lines. Only the fifty-six lines of fr. 195 which are identical with the opening of the Shield of Heracles provide a substantial and entirely secure consecutive section. Not surprisingly, working out the order in which the preserved fragments appeared in the original poem, assuming indeed that there was ‘an original poem’, has been neither easy nor uncontentious. The order championed by Merkelbach and West has become orthodox, and will be assumed here. It makes good sense of the surviving evidence, although it leaves some forty fragments unaccounted for, and seems unlikely to be seriously wrong in its basic structure, even if new discoveries have caused some revisions of details and more such revisions are highly likely.

In the light of all of that, it might seem that the best that we can do is to examine particular episodes, as do some other contributors to this volume. In this paper, however, I shall make an attempt at understanding the poem as a whole.