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over the shoulders or carried on the arm, its scalloped edges bordered with serpents. Elsewhere in the Iliad, it is described as “the betasselled, terrible / aegis, all about which Terror hangs like a garland, / and Hatred is there, and Battle Strength, and heart-freezing Onslaught / and thereon is set the head of the grim gigantic Gorgon, / a thing of fear and horror.” Associated with Zeus, his warrior daughter Athene, and Apollo, all of whom appear to have their own, an aegis is used to incite outright terror or, in Zeus’ case, fearful storm clouds. 2 This, then, is the object that ensures that battle for the Achaeans becomes “sweeter to them than to go back . . . to the beloved land of their fathers.” The descent of Athene to the field and the shadow of her terrifying aegis—like the rousing speeches of Nestor and Odysseus—are part of Zeus’ plan to honor his vow to Thetis. The Achaean host must be reassembled and the men’s spirits aroused for war so that they can die at the hands of their enemy and by their great losses bring Achilles honor.
    With bronze armor seemingly ablaze, the tumultuous host marches in all their confident, shouting magnificence into Zeus’ trap. The cascade of extraordinary similes drawn from the natural world, as often in the Iliad, is double-edged, underscoring both the sheer spectacle of a great army on the move and the inherent poignancy of its deadly march. Linguistic evidence shows that the Iliad ’s similes are generally “late,” meaning that they were introduced toward the end of the poetic tradition. 3 Often they undercut the very martial scenes they so vividly evoke with the sudden flare of a vision from the world of peace; here the apocalyptic image of blazing fire on the mountain heights swiftly gives way to that of a meadow full of migrating birds, a scene of teeming, clamorous life.
    Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympos.
For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things,
and we have heard only the rumour of it and know nothing.
Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the
Danaans?
As for the multitude, I won’t put them in speech, nor give them
names, 4
not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had
a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me,
not unless the Muses of Olympia, daughters
of Zeus of the aegis, remembered all those who came beneath Ilion.
    This second invocation, far more expansive than the invocation that announces the Iliad itself, intrudes abruptly into this majestic flow of images. Its purpose is to introduce a long list of 226 verses naming each of the twenty-nine contingents that make up the Achaean army. “The Catalogue of Ships,” as it is dubbed, has been variously interpreted as an authentic survival from the Mycenaean age to a pseudo document postdating Homer; several medieval manuscripts omit the list entirely or place it at epic’s end, as a kind of appendix. 5
    Leïtos and Peneleos were leaders of the Boiotians,
with Arkesilaos and Prothoenor and Klonios;
they who lived in Hyria and in rocky Aulis,
in the hill-bends of Eteonos.
    Of the 175 named places, a significant number can be identified with mostly late Mycenaean (circa 1250-1200 B.C.) sites, bolstering the claim that the Catalogue is a surviving relic from the Bronze Age. 6 On the other hand, late linguistic forms—the critical, much-repeated word for “ship” is a striking example 7 —along with certain geographical oddities, such as the omission of important Bronze Age place-names, also indicate that while the main contents of the Catalogue may possibly date to Mycenaean times, the list as a composition does not; this is not, in other words, an authentic muster roll lifted from the late Bronze Age. 8 The Catalogue’s strangely qualified prelude—“For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things, / and we have heard