Now as regards the list itself.
The Greek Array.
In this Catalogue, he had to go through the different States of Greece, furnishing twenty-nine contingents of various strengths, all indicated by the number of ships, to the army. These contingents are under forty-five leaders, many of them with genealogies, and coming from one hundred and seventy-one Greek towns. The proper names of the Greek Catalogue, strictly so called, are three hundred and ninety-six, and those of the Trojan one hundred and five, making in all five hundred and one. These must have been a selection from a larger number, for there were Greek towns (for example Φηραὶ of the Peloponnesus, Od. iii. 488, and the various towns named Ἐφύρη) not named in the Catalogue; and this again increased the difficulty of keeping by memory to the list throughout. Again, it was difficult to adopt any arrangement that should not be wholly arbitrary, in displaying to us the parts of an army which comprised so many divisions, and which was drawn from sources so numerous, and dispersed over a territory of such extremely irregular formation.
The principle of arrangement.
Homer has however with great ingenuity adopted a geographical arrangement in the Greek Catalogue, which, so far as the various divisions were concerned, has enabled him to combine them into a kind of whole.
The territory, which supplied the army, consisted partly of continent, and partly of islands: and the islands again were partly such as, lying about the coast of the mainland, might be most conveniently remembered in conjunction with it, partly such as formed a group of themselves.
If we take the continent and islands together, we shall find that they form part of a curvilinear figure, not indeed circular, but elliptical, and more nearly approaching a circle than that group of islands in the Ægean, which afterwards obtained the name of Cyclades. This name, taken from the rude approximation to a geometrical figure, may possibly have been at first suggested to the Greeks by Homer’s geometrical arrangement in the Catalogue. I speak of Homer’s arrangement as geometrical, because the principle he has adopted is that of mental figure drawing: it is of course of the rudest kind, and he perhaps did not even know the correct mode of constructing a circle.
The proportion of the figure formed by the mainland and islands is about two-thirds of a complete circumference: the ends of the curve being Thessaly to the north, and Calydnæ, with the other small islands, in the south-east.
Let us now proceed to notice, firstly, the primary division of the Catalogue into principal parts, and secondly, the subdivision in each of those parts.
It is worth while to remark, that the Poet has not adopted the mode of enumeration which might have been thought most obvious: namely, to begin at one of the extremities of this semicircle (so to call it), and then proceed towards the other. If the territorial subdivisions had been regular, this would have been convenient: but from their utter irregularity it would in this case have been wholly useless.