Collection of Ancient Vergilian Exegesis: A Thousand Years of Scholarship on the Aeneid

The Aeneid, Vergil’s masterpiece, published in 17 BC, two years after the death of the author, is universally recognised as the most important Roman epic poem. Since the very beginning of its circulation, in the 1st c. AD, it has drawn the attention of philologists and has been included in the school teaching of Latin grammar and rhetoric; in the following centuries an increasing number of commentaries on the Aeneid has been produced, engaging generations of scholars up to modern times. Therefore Vergil’s poem has not only played a key role in the history of poetry in Western literature and, more generally, in the reception of classical civilisation, but also in the history of the linguistic, rhetorical, and literary education in Europe as well as in the development of scribal practices and philological methodologies across Antiquity and Middle Ages.From the first 1000 years of such exegetical effort, two complete commentaries, countless glosses, Greek translations, and grammar books have survived: their tradition, that counts approximately 160 witnesses and also includes papyri and late antique parchments, is closely intertwined. The rich variety of the ancient and early medieval scholarship on the Aeneid can now be systematically investigated and illustrated thanks to digital humanities. Focussing on the first millennium of the transmission of the poem, CAVE aims to collect and critically edit the ancient and medieval exegetical works on the Aeneid, and to reconstruct, in a broader perspective, the places, moments, cultural environments, teaching practices in which Vergil’s masterpiece was studied. CAVE addresses these challenges with a multidisciplinary approach, gathering experts in textual criticism, palaeography, digital humanities, history of scholarship, linguistics, multispectral imaging. The research team will build an open source digital infrastructure, that will make available all the exegetical materials along with the catalogue of their manuscripts.