“Phaselus ille, quem videtis, hospites,
ait fuisse navium celerrimus”
I mean, what the irrumationem? Does C not speak latin any longer? Indirect speech with a nominative?!
What weird sort of semi-greek-latin kind of literary oddity am I dealing with here? Is this allowed? Should it be allowed?
MISER!!
I reinstate my previously retracted interjection:
O Catulle…
Most people seem to translate it as “says that it was the fastest of ships”. If a Latin student were to write this we would probably mark them wrong, but coming from Catullus it is “poetic license”. 
If it weren’t for that infinitive we could just call it direct statement, but instead I suppose it agrees with the subject of the sentence which seems to me like a bit of a stretch, but I am no poet.
Funny you should mention this. I was reading this poem just the other day and was puzzled by this very sentence.
My edition of Catullus (BCP Kenneth Quinn) has this to say:
celerrimus> : The nominative, restored against the reading of the MSS on the authority of the corresponding phrase in > Cat. 10 > (where the adjective agrees with the adjacent nominative noun, > mulio> ), though normal Greek syntax when verb of saying and dependent infinitive have a common subject, is rare in Latin.
The tone of confident proud reminiscence is tensioned to the level of poetic statement by the syntactical Graecism > ait…celerrimus> .
So you are quite correct. It is a strange greek-latin hybrid.
It seems that in the manuscripts the accusative is used, but, because a parody of this poem which describes the reminiscences of a muleteer Sabinus uses the nominative as well, the editor has used the nominative. The effect is to make the boat’s statement grander. I know nothing of Greek syntax. Perhaps you better ask the Greeks in the higher forums.
Perhaps the Romans though using Greek syntax made their poems all fancy schmantzy like.
If you read the “ait” more as “claim” or “declare” rather than “say,” it may help.
" He claims to have been the fastest of ships."
It is definitely weird.
Well if you should ever write any latin see it as perfectly fine to speak on the threshold of total inaccuracy also. If some guy like catullus could do it we can too.
Thanks all! I suppose we now all have ‘poetic’ licence to do anything we like in latin!! If the great Catullus can do it, so can we, Episcope, I couldn’t agree more.
More Catullian trivia soon (no doubt 
)!
Actually that was quite a funny, prime example of the extremes of this ‘poetic license’ - nice one Kasper Let’s convert the license like microsoft windows to prose also
After thought:
It seems that in the manuscripts the accusative is used
Then wouldn’t ‘se’ be required as well, and thereby completely destroy the meter?
“ait se fuisse navium celerrimum” wouldn’t fit, would it?
(I too am not a poet)
read the “ait” more as “claim” or “declare” rather than “say,”
Pardon my ignorance, do “claim” and “declare” not count as indirect speech when it is repeated what the person, or ship, declared or claimed?
Should I add this the long long list of exceptions in latin syntax?
se could certainly be implied and I would much rather have read it this way but for the nominative celerrimus. The evil thing about it is that an accusative would have fit the metre just as well, but Catullus chose the Greek formation instead.
read the “ait” more as “claim” or “declare” rather than “say,”
Pardon my ignorance, do “claim” and “declare” not count as indirect speech when it is repeated what the person, or ship, declared or claimed?
Should I add this the long long list of exceptions in latin syntax?
I think you are right Kasper, it would still have to say “claims himself to have been…”; even in direct speech it wouldn’t make sense because we still have to deal with the infinitive fuisse.
Is this allowed? Should it be allowed?
It seems we are a couple of thousand years too late to forbid it now, Kasper! 
If the great Catullus can do it, so can we, Episcope, I couldn’t agree more.
But it maybe behoves us to be poets of Catullus’ standard before using jazzy Greek-sounding idiomata in our Latin writing? Wow, that would be something to aspire to! 
I think that the mark of a great author is flexing the rules and eccentricity. Catullus has both but I still hate him, he is not that good son.
A note in an anthology I have confirms everything you have said and then some. It finds ’celerrimus’ interesting for another reason too. I quote:
’ait fuisse navium celerrimus’: in prose we should have ’ait se fuisse celerrimum’. Catullus, who is writing in Greek metre and style, uses the nominative with the infinitive as a Greek would have done in such a sentence. He is not doing great violence to the Latin language; as one said ’dicitur esse sapiens’ and ’vult esse sapiens’, it would not seem so very strange in a poem of this sort to say ’ait esse sapiens’.
’navium celerrimus’: we should expect ’celerrima’, for the sense is ’the fastest ship of all’, but in Latin a superlative defined by a partitive genitive regularly takes the gender of the subject (here ’phaselus’) and not of the genitive. So Cicero writes ’Indus, qui est omnium fluminum maximus’, ’the Indus, which is the greatest of all rivers’.
Cheers,
Int
Interesting notes Interaxus.
’ait fuisse navium celerrimus’: in prose we should have ’ait se fuisse celerrimum’. Catullus, who is writing in Greek metre and style, uses the nominative with the infinitive as a Greek would have done in such a sentence. He is not doing great violence to the Latin language; as one said ’dicitur esse sapiens’ and ’vult esse sapiens’, it would not seem so very strange in a poem of this sort to say ’ait esse sapiens’.
The comparison of the three uses of nominative is good, but I see a distinct difference between the first two and the last (the one used by Cat.). In dicitur esse sapiens the verb is passive and cannot take a direct object. In vult esse sapiens the verb “to want” does not require indirect discourse. So, ait esse sapiens is peculiar but it apparently is not a huge leap from other constructions.
’navium celerrimus’: we should expect ’celerrima’, for the sense is ’the fastest ship of all’, but in Latin a superlative defined by a partitive genitive regularly takes the gender of the subject (here ’phaselus’) and not of the genitive. So Cicero writes ’Indus, qui est omnium fluminum maximus’, ’the Indus, which is the greatest of all rivers’.
That caught my eye as well, but this was not nearly as confusing as the other issue.