Catullus 4

Catullus draws a strong analogy with human aging, rendering the boat as a person that flies and speaks, with palms (the oars) and purpose.

This version says that the phasellus claims that in his hey-day with mainsail and spanker / He outsailed all vessels; and the ending becomes: At his last landfall now, beyond all resurgence, / View him careened upon a final lee-shore; / .

et hoc negat minacis Hadriatici negare litus insulasve Cycladas Rhodumque nobilem horridamque Thraciam Propontida trucemve Ponticum sinum,[a] ubi iste post phaselus antea fuit comata silva; nam Cytorio[b] in iugo loquente saepe sibilum edidit coma.

Amastri Pontica et Cytore buxifer tibi haec fuisse et esse cognitissima ait phaselus: ultima ex origine tuo stetisse dicit in cacumine tuo imbuisse palmulas in aequore et inde tot per impotentia freta erum tulisse, laeva sive dextera vocaret aura, sive utrumque Iuppiter simul secundus incidisset in pedem; neque ulla vota litoralibus deis sibi esse facta, cum veniret a mari novissimo hunc ad usque limpidum lacum.

Pontic Amastris and box-tree-bearing Cytorus, that to you these things were and are most known says the light ship: that out of your earliest birth, she says, she stood at your peak, wetted her palms [or oars] in your flat sea, and then across so many impotent straits bore her master, whether the left or right breeze summoned [you], or whether favourable Jupiter fell on each foot at once; [And she says] that neither were any prayers to the shore gods made by her, when she came by sea very recently to this continuously clear lake.