Since Milman PARRY transformed Homeric scholarship with his discoveries about the formulaic nature of Greek oral poetry, surprisingly little has been done to clarify the workings of the formula in Homer'. In the following I offer a comprehensive study of the most conspicuously'formulaic'sequence in the corpus 2, the Catalogue of Ships (B 494-709). My purpose is to show that all entries in the Catalogue, except for the suprious Athenian entry, follow one of three patterns, each truly striking for its structural rigidity. It would seem that, because the Catalogue is called upon to organize highly heterogeneous material without the support of plot or action, it therefore depends upon an unusually firm structural substratum. This rigidity could well account for the apparently archaic nature and the putative Boeotian origin of the Catalogue3: the harder it becomes to make changes, the more likely it is that changes will not be made. We need not, therefore, suppose separate authorship for the Catalogue, but may see in it a'frozen'sequence that entered the poet's repertory at an early date, and then remained unchanged, much as some Mycenaean artifacts and words were preserved by the tradition 4. These, then, are the three patterns according to which every entry in the Catalogue of Ships is organized: