The dream and the catalogue of ships

Zeus, having promised Thetis the Greeks will suffer, sends Agamemnon a dream telling him today is the day he will take Troy. Agamemnon wakes confident. He decides to test the army's spirit by announcing the opposite — that the war is lost, and they should sail home. He expects the men to refuse and rally. They do not. Exhausted by ten years of fighting, they run for the ships in a wild scramble. The expedition is on the verge of dissolving on the beach.

Odysseus, prompted by Athena, stops it. He runs through the camp grabbing men by the arm and ordering them back. He uses the staff Agamemnon gave him to beat one chronic complainer — Thersites, the only common soldier given a name in the poem — and the army, not without grumbling, reassembles. Odysseus reminds them of the omen they saw at Aulis nine years before, when a snake ate eight sparrow chicks and their mother and was turned to stone — a sign that they would fight nine years and win in the tenth.

The book then breaks into the Catalogue of Ships, the longest list in classical literature. Captain by captain, contingent by contingent, the Greek expedition is named — sometimes a city, sometimes a leader, sometimes a small story attached to a name that will not appear again. Modern readers sometimes skip it; ancient audiences memorized it. It is the poem's argument, in catalogue form, that this war involved the whole Greek world. A short Trojan catalogue follows. The two armies are now in the field, named, and ready to fight.