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Comment by romanhn | Hacker News Reader

> the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy

It's been about 30 years since I've read The Iliad, but I remember that chapter as the worst part of the book. Just pages upon pages of names and where they came from. I wonder what significance it held for the buried individual to have been specifically included so.

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This is an old technique that appears in Beowulf and other classic texts that came from oral traditions: it is cataloging. It is often used to list treasured collected or in this case to show expansiveness of the fleet (and memory of the teller, perhaps?)

Think about 10 year olds talking about all the different candies they are going to devour on Halloween night to get a sense of how it is meant to resonate with a crowd.

If the only way you could hear about Napoleon's battles was having a guy recount them to you in verse, I bet it would sound pretty impressive when he started listing off all the regiments present for a battle, their commanders and deployments. There's a sense of scale to it, that probably isn't captured by just saying "such and such number of ships and such and such number of soldiers".

Sounds like an Order of Battle that armies publish these days after a war which documents the entire list of units, unit size, commander, equipment, experience etc etc

Maybe the undertaker agreed with you about it being the worst part, and that's why they used it for the burial!

often times the classical Greeks + Romans would cite their family lineage using works of Homer and other poets

probably traced his lineage back to one of those vessels.

I imagine it served a similar purpose as a modern war memorial.

People loved that damn catalogue enough to be buried with it! I guess tastes have changed.

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