despite its popularity among the hellenistic literati and reading public of roman egypt, the poem went out of circulation before it could pass into a medieval manuscript tradition and is preserved today by papyrus fragments and quotations in ancient authors. still, the "catalogue" is much better attested than most "lost" works, with some 1,300 whole or partial lines surviving: "between a third and a quarter of the original poem", by one estimate. the evidence for the poem's reconstruction—not only elements of its content, but the distribution of that content within the "catalogue"—is indeed extensive, but the fragmentary nature of this evidence leaves many unresolved complexities and has over the course of the past century led to several scholarly missteps.