Elena Spangenberg Yanes, researcher in Latin Language and Literature at the Department of Ancient World Studies at Sapienza University, has been awarded the ERC Consolidator Grant 2025 with the CAVE project, obtaining funding of €1,999,490.

The CAVE project (Collection of Ancient Vergilian Exegesis: A Thousand Years of Scholarship on the Aeneid) is dedicated to the study of the scholastic and erudite reception of Virgil's Aeneid (17 BC), universally recognised as the most important Roman epic poem.

Since its dissemination began in the first century AD, the Aeneid has attracted the attention of scholars and educators and has been included in the teaching of Latin grammar and rhetoric in schools. In the centuries that followed, an increasing number of commentaries on the Aeneid were produced, involving generations of scholars up to modern times.

Two complete commentaries, countless glosses, Greek translations and grammatical treatises have survived from the first thousand years of this exegetical effort: their tradition, which includes around 160 witnesses and also comprises papyri and late antique codices, is closely interconnected. The rich variety of ancient and early medieval studies on the Aeneid can now be systematically studied and represented thanks to digital humanities.

Focusing on the first millennium of transmission of the poem, CAVE aims to collect and critically edit ancient and early medieval exegetical works on the Aeneid and to reconstruct, from a broader perspective, the places, moments, teaching practices and cultural environments in which Virgil's masterpiece was studied. CAVE tackles these challenges with a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together experts in textual criticism, palaeography, digital humanities, cultural history, linguistics, and multispectral imaging.

The research team will develop the Latin Grammarians Collection open source digital infrastructure, which originated from the previous ERC pages project, integrating exegetical materials relating to Virgil's poem together with the manuscript catalogue.