  the catalogue of ships (, neÅn katalogos) is an epic catalogue in book 2 of homer's iliad (2.494-759), which lists the contingents of the achaean army that sailed to troy.homer, iliad 2.494-759 the catalogue gives the names of the leaders of each contingent, lists the settlements in the kingdom represented by the contingent, sometimes with a descriptive epithet that fills out a half-verse or articulates the flow of names and parentage and place, and gives the number of ships required to transport the men to troy, offering further differentiations of weightiness. a similar, though shorter, catalogue of the trojans and their allies follows (2.816â877). a similar catalogue appears in the pseudo-apollodoran bibliotheca. ==historical background==  the designation "catalogue of ships" suggests that the passage is in some way detachable from its context. it is bracketed between two invocations. in the debate since antiquityfor herodotus the questions are already open. over the catalogue of ships, the core questions have concerned the extent of historical credibility of the account, whether it was composed by homer himself, to what extent it reflects a pre-homeric document or memorized tradition, surviving perhaps in part from mycenaean times, or whether it is a result of post-homeric development.j.k. anderson, 1995. "the geometric catalogue of ships," pp. 181-191 in carter and morris, editors, the ages of homer, (austin: university of texas press). dÃ¶rpfeld notes that while in odyssey odysseus's kingdom includes ithaca, same, dulichium, and zacynthus, the catalogue of ships contains a different list of islands, again ithaca, same, and zacynthus but now also neritum, krocylea, and aegilips.the separate debate over the identity of homer and the authorship of the iliad and the odyssey is conventionally termed "the homeric question". the consensus before the mid-twentieth century was that the catalogue of ships was not the work of the man who composed the iliad,succinctly expressed by c.m. bowra in a review of f. jacoby, die einschaltung des schiffkatalogs in die ilias in the classical review 47.5 (november 1933), p. 174. though great pains had been taken to render it a work of art;john crossett, "the art of homer's catalogue of ships" the classical journal 64.6 (march 1969), pp. 241-245, discusses the dramatic function of the catalogue in 
Iliad Trojan_War