[1][2] Plato expands the established metaphor and ultimately argues that the only people fit to be captain of the ship (Ancient Greek: ναῦς) are philosopher kings, benevolent men with absolute power who have access to the Form of the Good.
The origins of the metaphor can be traced back to the lyric poet Alcaeus (fragments 6, 208, 249), and it is also found in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles' Antigone and Aristophanes' Wasps before Plato.
During the Renaissance, Sebastian Brant amplified and reworked Plato's text in a satirical book called Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff, 1494) which was translated soon in Latin, French and English.
Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain’s hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer’s art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling.
Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?Reference to it has been made routinely throughout Western culture ever since its inception; two notable literary examples are Horace's ode 1.14 and "O Ship of State" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
[4] More recently, it has become a staple of American political discussion, where it is viewed simply as its image of the state as a ship, in need of a government as officers to command it—and conspicuously absent of its anti-democratic, pro-absolutist original meaning.