According to legend, a thousand ships set sail from Greece to carry the Greek army bent on sacking Troy and reclaiming Helen, yet I can’t recall any of the ships names being mentioned in either the Iliad or Odyssey. Given the level of detail with which Homer spends explaining things like the images on a shield, one would think that there would be some mention of the names of the ships in which the Greeks set sail.
Admittedly, I’ve only read the works in translation, so it might be possible that they snipped the names for readability issues, but I’ve never read anything indicating that this was done.
I suppose that it’s possible that naming ships wasn’t common in the time in which the works were written, but that raises the question of when did it first occur in ancient Greece (obviously, some ships must have been named, since Jason called his Argo)?
In Book 2, around line 490 of the Greek text, is found the Catalogue of Ships. It does not list the ships, individually by name, but presents the war leaders and their troops, identified by the island or kingdom from which they came. The list goes on for about 300 lines, with each leader being assigned between 20 and 50 ships, on average. Had each ship been named, the poem would have doubled in size.
I don’t remember if the Greeks commonly named their ships, but at least one - The Argos of Jason and the Argonauts, comes to mind. When Homer was writing, he had to keep the meter of the poem in mind, and adding the names of a thousand ships AND keeping to the meter might have proved a little bit of a problem.
The Argo seems to be more the exception than the rule. Besides the Homeric epics, The ships carrying Theseus, Heracles, Peleus, and other Greek legendary heroes are not named. I’m no Greek scholar, but the assigning of individual ship names seems to have post-dated this era. In that time, names may have been the equivalent of "George’s ship, " where George is the ship master, helmsman, owner, etc.
