Iliad, Book 2 — The False Dream; the Catalogue of Ships

Reading Troy — chapter 2 of 74 · Iliad, Book 2

Iliad, Book 2 — The False Dream; the Catalogue of Ships (Day 22 of the Iliad, the morning after Zeus's nod; the Greek camp on the beach and the plain before Troy)

Night on the beach; Zeus, sleepless, sets the wrath-machinery in motion. He summons a Lying Dream — that is the formula, the dream is a personified envoy — and sends it down in the shape of Nestor to stand over Agamemnon's pillow. The dream says: arm the long-haired Achaeans now, for at last you shall take the wide-wayed city of Priam. It is a lie. The Greeks will not take Troy today; many will die instead. But Agamemnon believes it without a tremor.

At dawn he calls a council of the elders by Nestor's ship and tells them the dream. Then — a swerve — he announces a strange test: he will go to the full assembly and propose retreat; the elders must hold the men. Nestor approves. The assembly is convened. Agamemnon rises with the ancestral sceptre Hephaestus made and Hermes carried, and tells the men Zeus has played me false; nine years are gone, the timbers of the ships are rotten, our wives sit waiting. Let us flee.

The test fails instantly. The Achaeans shout for the ships as the waves of the Icarian Sea rise under the east wind — Homer's first great simile of the poem — and break for the prows, dragging the keels toward water. Hera looks down and is appalled. She sends Athena. Athena finds Odysseus standing still and grieving by his ship; she names him peer of Zeus in counsel. Odysseus seizes Agamemnon's sceptre and turns the tide. To the kings he speaks softly; to the common men he strikes with the staff: one man must be master, one king.

Then the Thersites scene — the only moment in the Iliad given to a man neither noble nor heroic. Bandy-legged, lame of one foot, his head running up to a point — Thersites rails at Agamemnon for greed, says Achilles is the better man and was robbed, and asks the Greeks to sail. Odysseus beats him bloody with the sceptre. The army laughs. The hierarchy holds.

Odysseus then makes the real speech: remember the omen at Aulis, where a serpent ate the eight fledglings and the sparrow that hatched them, and Calchas declared nine years we fight, in the tenth we take Troy. The tenth year is now. Nestor follows, urging Agamemnon to draw the army up by tribes and clans so cowards will be visible. Agamemnon sacrifices a five-year-old bull to Zeus, prays for the burning of Priam's gates, and the host moves.

What follows is the great Catalogue. The Muses are invoked — I am one and you are nine — and the Achaean contingents are named, region by region, ship by ship. Twenty-nine entries: Boeotians fifty ships, Athenians fifty, Mycenae a hundred (Agamemnon's force the finest and most numerous), Sparta sixty (Menelaus burning to avenge Helen), Pylos ninety (Nestor), Ithaca twelve (Odysseus), Crete eighty (Idomeneus). Two entries hold ghosts: Achilles's fifty Myrmidons sit idle because he stayed by the ships, furious about the loss of Briseis; Philoctetes's seven crews are leaderless because their archer lies on Lemnos with a snakebite that will not heal.

The Trojan catalogue answers it — shorter, multilingual, with Hector at the head, Aeneas leading the Dardanians, Pandarus from Ida who knows the bow, Sarpedon and Glaucus coming up from far Lycia. The book ends with both hosts on the plain, the earth groaning as if Zeus lashed the land about Typhoeus — the world set for collision. The day of battle has not begun. Everyone has been named.

Analysis

A book of two functions

Iliad 2 does two jobs that almost any other epic would have split across two books. First, it stages the false dream and Agamemnon's nearly catastrophic test of the troops, with the Thersites incident and Odysseus's rescue of the campaign. Second, it gives us the Catalogue of Ships — the longest, slowest, most genealogically saturated passage in Homer. The two halves can feel mismatched on a first reading. They are not. The first half is about how order is restored in the army after Achilles's withdrawal; the second half is the demonstration of that order, the full visible body of the Achaean polity laid out in formation. The book is a study in how a war-society reasserts itself.

The false dream and the politics of lying

Zeus sends a deceiving message and Agamemnon, the man who in Book 1 was too proud to take the truth from Calchas, swallows it whole. The asymmetry is structural. Agamemnon's authority is now so brittle — the army has watched him insult Achilles in public — that he cannot trust the dream to do its own work. He invents a test: he will preach retreat to see who restrains him. The test fails because Agamemnon does not understand his own men. Homer is showing us that the wrath has already eaten into the chain of command at every level, and only an outsider to the original quarrel — Odysseus, who in Book 1 was off-stage at Chryse — can stitch the army back. The whole catastrophic arc of Books 3–17 is set in motion by Agamemnon's incompetence with rhetoric.

Thersites: the only non-hero who gets to speak

The Thersites passage is the strangest moment in the Iliad's first third. For seventy-five lines the poem looks at a man who is ugly, malformed, hated by Achilles and Odysseus, and who makes a speech that is — read on its own terms — correct. Agamemnon did take more than his share. Achilles is the better man. The war has dragged on. Homer lets all of this be said and then lets Odysseus beat the speaker bloody, and the army laughs. The aristocratic order has policed its own internal critique by making the critic grotesque. Later Greek literature will spend a millennium working over this scene — Plato, the Cynics, Lucian. For the Iliad it is a hinge: with Thersites silenced, the army can become a unified force again. The price is the silencing.

The Catalogue as memory-machine

The Catalogue of Ships — twenty-nine Achaean contingents, sixteen Trojan — is not a list. It is an oral mnemonic that preserves a Mycenaean Greek geography that had already vanished by Homer's day. Scholars from Walter Leaf to Denys Page have shown that the Catalogue's place-names cluster around late Bronze Age polities, not eighth-century BCE ones. The poet is doing something archaeological: he is reciting a map that was already old when he learned it. For the reader, the Catalogue's pleasure is local — the men who held rocky Aulis and held Schoenus — and cumulative: the sheer pile of names is the demonstration of mass. It is also a casualty list in waiting. Many of the named will die in books to come; the catalogue is the war's first ledger.

Butler's prose against the Catalogue

This book is the hardest test of Butler's translation strategy. Pope rhymed his way through the Catalogue in stately couplets and made a roll-call into music; Lattimore's hexameter chants it; Fagles paragraphs it with white space. Butler, committed to plain English prose, treats it as a serious gazetteer — flat, lucid, with occasional flashes of dry pleasure (The men of Magnesia, by the river Peneus and Mt. Pelion, were commanded by fleet Prothous, son of Tenthredon, and with him there came forty ships). Some readers find this register too cool for the Catalogue's grandeur. Read it instead as Butler trusting Homer's content to carry itself — and notice that when Butler reaches Achilles's fifty Myrmidons sitting idle, the prose stops being flat. He stayed by the ships, furious about the loss of the girl Briseis — the wrath hasn't gone anywhere; it is inside the Catalogue, a hole the rest cannot fill.

What to watch for

Watch for the sceptre. It is the same physical object Achilles swore on in Book 1 and is here carried by Agamemnon as the sign of his authority — then borrowed by Odysseus to beat Thersites with. The same staff is used to oath, to command, and to discipline; the Iliad never lets us forget that authority is a physical instrument. Watch the two leaders who are absent in the Catalogue but named anyway — Achilles in his tent, Philoctetes on Lemnos. Both will return in the cycle and the absences will be paid out: Achilles in Book 16, Philoctetes in Posthomerica 9. Watch Sarpedon and Glaucus, just arrived from Lycia — their friendship-by-genealogy in Book 6 will be one of the great quiet scenes of the poem. And watch the Catalogue's last simile, the earth groaning under the marching host as if Zeus lashed the land about Typhoeus. The Iliad's first long book is closing on the image of a buried monster shifting under the world's weight. Everything we have just heard named will walk on top of that ground tomorrow.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The Catalogue's first job is to look backward — to a Mycenaean political geography already legendary by Homer's day. The serpent-omen at Aulis that Odysseus recites here belongs to a Bronze Age memory of the army's first muster; Aeschylus and Sophocles would later build whole plays out of what Homer summarises in a single speech. Inside the Iliad's own first day, this book backward-echoes the staff-oath of Book 1: the same sceptre Achilles cursed by is the one Agamemnon now uses, the one Odysseus seizes to beat Thersites with, the one that becomes the visible token of authority for the assembly. The Aulis-serpent is also Homer's first long embedded narrative — a sign that the Iliad will work by inset stories as much as by linear action.

Forward echoes

Inside the Iliad. Almost everyone named in the Catalogue dies inside the poem. The list is a casualty manifest. The absences are louder than the presences: Achilles's fifty idle Myrmidons are a hole the next fourteen books cannot fill; they will only be filled in Book 16 when Patroclus puts on Achilles's armour and leads them out. Thersites's role as the silenced critic returns at Book 9, where the embassy will be its mirror — the noble speech that Agamemnon's authority can hear.

Into the Posthomerica. Quintus's Greek catalogue at the start of Posthomerica 1 — the warriors who gather to fight Penthesilea — is consciously modelled on Iliad 2: same gazetteer rhythm, same hexameter-style enumeration. Philoctetes, sitting unnamed on Lemnos here, is the structural seed of Posthomerica 9, where the embassy finally goes to fetch him for the war's last act.

Into the Aeneid. Virgil reads this book carefully and twice. Aeneid 7 stages a deliberate counter-Catalogue of the Italian forces that come against Aeneas — Mezentius, Turnus, Camilla, Lausus — modelled line by line on Iliad 2's Trojan section; the catalogue is Virgil's signature of intent, I am writing inside Homer. And Iris's descent to mobilise the Trojans here — the messenger in the form of a familiar — is the template for Mercury's descent to Aeneas in Aeneid 4, the divine intervention that breaks an attachment in favour of a duty. Virgil's first reading of the Aulis-serpent's nine years is, of course, the long delay of the Trojan refugees before founding Rome.

Into the Odyssey. Odysseus's day here is his sign-piece. The man who in Book 1 was a competent envoy is now the man who holds the army together when the king fails — the diplomat-rhetorician who beats sedition with a staff and recalls the omen that nobody else has remembered. That is the Odysseus the Odyssey will assume from the first line. The Thersites scene is also the first time we see Odysseus's gift for cruelty, the dark side his Athenian afterlife will magnify; the man who twenty-two books from now will lie to a beggar at his own door starts here. And the serpent-omen of Aulis is the Iliad's pattern for delayed prophecy fulfilled, the structural template for every oracle Tiresias will give in Odyssey 11.

The book that looks like a list is the cycle's deepest planting.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Zeus — sends the Lying Dream that begins the day; the false promise of immediate victory
• Agamemnon — believes the dream, miscalculates the test, nearly loses the army to retreat
• Nestor — endorses the dream's authority, urges the army to be drawn up by tribes and clans
• Odysseus — the day's true commander; takes the sceptre, beats Thersites, recalls the omen at Aulis, holds the army together
• Hera — sees the Greeks running for the ships and dispatches Athena
• Athena — descends to find Odysseus and sets him in motion; later moves invisible through the host with her aegis
• Calchas — quoted by Odysseus through the recollection of the Aulis serpent-omen; nine sparrows eaten, nine years foretold
• Ajax Lesser — Locrian captain, linen-armoured, the spear-thrower; first named in the Catalogue
• Iris — sent by Zeus to Troy in Polites's form to mobilise the Trojans
• Aeneas — first named here, leading the Dardanians, the son of Aphrodite by Anchises

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — his fifty Myrmidons sit idle by their ships; the wrath is the only hole in the Catalogue
• Philoctetes — left on Lemnos with the snakebite that will not heal; his archers without a captain
• Briseis — the named cause of Achilles's withdrawal even inside the roll-call
• Menelaus — leads sixty Spartan ships, burning to avenge Helen
• Helen — the war's cause, named only through Menelaus
• Hector — head of the Trojan force in the answering catalogue, of the gleaming helmet
• Priam — convenes the Trojan assembly outside the gates where Iris descends

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.