The Vergil Project is an ongoing project to create an online, interactive critical text and commentary for the works of the Roman poet Vergil along with an array of pedagogical and scholarly resources for Vergil studies that would benefit users ranging from high school Latin students and instructors to advanced graduate students and professional classics scholars. The project was started in 1995‐1996 by faculty and students in classics at the University of Pennsylvania where it continues to receive strong institutional support. It has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and other organizations.
The ultimate aim of the Vergil project is to provide a free, web‐based variorum edition of Vergil’s works (the Aeneid, Eclogues, and Georgics) that will allow readers to compare different versions of the poems and explore variant readings along with commentary. The texts are to be linked to both brief and occasionally lengthy notes prepared by the Vergil Project participants along with references to the standard Servius and the Conington‐Nettleship‐Haverfield commentaries.
The project also maintains Vergil’s Home Page (the Pagina Domestica P. Vergili Maronis), a site which will contain resources for secondary and university instructors, a library of images, and links to other Vergil‐related sites and discussion lists. The project is still in a somewhat early, formative stage: the full text of the Aeneid (in multiple versions) is currently available, but commentary has been written only for Book 1. The commentary for the remaining eleven books is not scheduled to be completed until at least 2000. This early prototype of the site does, nevertheless, suggest that it will be a valuable tool for a wide range of audiences interested in the study of classical literature and culture.
The specialized text editing features and the hypertext format for presenting the commentary are the project’s greatest strengths. The reader can choose among five different online versions of the Aeneid: the four ancient manuscript sources of the poem and a “Communal Text” which is continually being constructed out of the editorial choices of the visitors to the site. Each text can be viewed along with variants and conjectural emendations and every word is linked to detailed commentary prepared by teams of Vergil specialists from secondary schools and universities participating in the project in conjunction with their students.
The commentary for Book 1 was written by faculty and students from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995‐1996 and a series of summer instructor institutes and follow‐up sessions with other participating institutions are planned over the next three years to create the commentary for Books 2‐12. The project does stress that there will be close editorial supervision by Vergil scholars to maintain the quality of the final project; and a board for evaluating the site has been created. The available commentary covers such aspects of the text as grammar, translation, syntax, meter, themes and motifs, characters, and mythical and literary sources — including links to the online Greek text of the Iliad and Odyssey prepared by the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/) to facilitate comparisons with the Homeric epics.
There are plans to include links to full‐length essays written by scholars on various literary and historical topics of Vergil’s society so that the site will eventually become, in the designers’ words, “a veritable encyclopedia of Roman civilization.” The site also provides a feature which enables readers to edit their own personalized text using a form linked to a CGI script. The reader can construct this “Personal Text” of the Aeneid using one of the various manuscript versions as a base text and selecting variant readings for disputed passages. The choices will be saved by the server; and the reader can access or change his or her customized text page with a pre‐selected user i.d. and password. Readers can even opt to add their own commentary and notes to their texts to personalize them even further. Each day the textual choices made by the various readers in forming their Personal Texts are incorporated into the Communal Text, making it an ever‐evolving, interactive edition of Vergil whose shape would be determined by the editorial decisions of those visiting the site rather than by the preferences of a single editor or board. (Note: recent software upgrades at the project have created some problems with the personal text editor; but the administrators promise to have the problems corrected as soon as possible.)
Eventually, scansion and parsing drills will also be linked to the text, making it a valuable resource for those studying the metrical and linguistic elements. The readily accessible commentary will be a benefit for lower‐level students reading Vergil for the first time, though secondary school and undergraduate readers will need extensive guidance in choosing among the different versions of the text and might not be sufficiently versed in Vergilian textual editing to make use of the Personal Text options. Advanced undergraduates and especially graduate and professional researchers will find the site an excellent means to study the nuances of editing and textual criticism. Because the commentary will be produced by a diverse range of specialists and students, it will not likely become a standard commentary for advanced scholarly consultation. Yet, the avenues the site opens for exploring Vergil’s works will be greatly appreciated even by sophisticated researchers.
The associated Vergil Home Page is designed to offer educators a large supply of resources to use in teaching courses on Vergil and Roman literature. This page is, like the online Aeneid, still under construction; so many of the links are currently inoperative and the site’s full potential will only be apparent in the future. Currently available resources such as the Bibliography of Vergilian Scholarship 1964‐1996 and the links to other bibliographic materials are useful. There are also several online articles and book reviews as well as course syllabi which can be used as guides for university instructors. The links to other sites such as the Vergilian Society page as well as to other electronic text sites and lists of interest to Vergil scholars are welcome additions. Some of the images and downloadable course materials have not yet been loaded (the links to remote sites are more dependable); but these problems should be rectified when the site is fully operational. I would recommend academic libraries seeking to support programs in classics to examine this site, for it does reveal how the World Wide Web can contribute to the analysis of ancient texts and particularly how the online environment can enable students and researchers to explore different versions of the poems in ways that printed editions would never allow. The project’s ultimate contribution to the field of Vergil studies and to Classics as a whole will not be clear until the text/commentary and other curricular materials have been completed. The time line for providing the online text and commentary for the Eclogues and Georgics has not been determined; and the full Aeneid will not be available for at least three years. It will nevertheless be worth watching how this site continues to develop in the coming years.
