the first is by far the best-attested book of the poem, with several extensive papyri overlapping ancient quotations or coinciding with paraphrases: at least 420 verses of dactylic hexameter survive in part or entire. one papyrus includes line numbers which, taken together with the system of overlaps among the other sources, allows much of the book's content to be assigned approximate line numbers. perhaps the most significant of these overlaps is between the papyrus containing the opening lines of the poem and the "theogony": the "catalogue" was styled as a continuation of the "canonical" hesiodic poem, with the final two verses of the "theogony" standing as "catalogue of women" book 1, lines 1–2. toward the end of the "theogony" as transmitted by the manuscript tradition, following zeus's final ordering of olympus and his siring several key deities, the poet invokes the muses to sing of the "tribe of goddesses ... immortals who slept with mortal men, bearing children like gods." after some 150 verses on this topic, the proem to the "catalogue" comes in the form of another re-invocation of the muses to introduce a new, only slightly more terrestrial topic ("cat". fr. 1.1–5):