Ship narratives in Roman literature in the light of object-centered narratology

Abstract

This study examines ship narratives in Roman literature – beyond Horace’s Ode I.14, focusing on Catullus’ Carmen 4 and Vergil’s Aeneid – from the perspective of object-centered narratology. Its starting point is that ships in these texts are not merely tools of human action, but objects possessing a specific agency. The analysis centers on the motif of material continuity: ships preserve the memory of their organic origin, the trees, thereby embodying a transition between the living natural world and the human-made technological sphere.