Inovking maven2 goal mvn dependency:list on an artifact pom causes to download the whole dependent artifact packages. I think only those pom files are necessary for resolving dependencies. Aren't they?
On the dependecy plugin documentation you can read that dependency:list is an alias for dependency:resolve. What you need is dependency:tree which :
Displays the dependency tree for this project.
Even with dependency:tree you will have to download dependencies.
From Arnaud Héritier (developer on Maven Project)
This is a problem in maven core which doesn't allow in 2.x to resolve dependencies without downloading artifacts.