The book, written by the outstanding Russian historian, archaeologist and philologist L. S. Klein, sums up his many years of research into the Homeric epic, presented in the works “Anatomy of the Iliad”, “Ethereal Heroes”, “The Deciphered Iliad”. A special place in these studies is occupied by the “Catalogue of Ships” - the famous segment of the second book of the Iliad, which Klein considers the key to the entire Iliad as a whole. Klein's original approach - and he decided to trace the fate of Homer's heroes not from Homer to our time, but in the opposite direction, from Homer into the depths of time - allowed him to find out what the real prototypes of the heroes of the Iliad were in ancient history and mythology. Meticulous work with the structure of the text - unfolding it in time, stratifying it by era - made it possible to answer many questions noted both by the author himself and many other famous scientists.