Latin literature

As always, it is hard to do justice to the many intriguing books that came out over the past months. I will try to give an overview of at least a few of them, from Republican literature over two imperial ‘Classics’, the Aeneid and the Fasti, over Ps.-Quintilian's Declamations and Apuleius, fourth and fifth-century commentaries, all the way to a lesser-known work from the fifteenth century. Let us start, however, with an exciting volume on ‘Roman Law and Latin Literature’, edited by Ioannis Ziogas and Erica Bexley.¹ In their introduction, the two editors sketch out the relationship between law and literature, emphasizing the points of contact and the intricate relationship between the two. While the Law and Humanities movement, they argue, has been so far strongly focused on law, with literature playing an ancillary role, Ziogas and Bexley aim to redress that balance ‘by showing how literature anticipates, imitates, supplants or complements law's role in constituting rules and norms’ (3). The contributions in the volume cover a wide range of authors, from Naevius, Plautus, and Terence to Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. With her discussion of the role Latin literature played in shaping Roman concepts of legality, in the absence of a codified constitution, Michèle Lowrie provides a very good starting point to the volume, one that a couple of other contributors keep referring back to. There is a chapter on the jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo by Matthijs Wibier, Nora Goldschmidt traces the emergence of the Foucauldian author function in the interaction between law and literature in third-century bc Rome, and John Oksanish argues that Cicero, in De oratore (‘On the Orator’), adopts the theoretical and terminological frameworks of Roman property law to authorize the orator's power over various domains, a strategy also adopted by Vitruvius, to mention just a few of the topics covered. The concluding paper is a thought-provoking piece by Nandini Pandey, comparing Roman and American legal and literary practices around freedom, opportunity, and (in)equality.

The volume more than accomplishes its goals: all of the contributions make it very clear that a lot is to be gained from reading Latin texts with attention to their dialogue with law and legal vocabulary (as Ziogas himself has already demonstrated for Ovidian love poetry).² In particular, Erica Bexley shows for Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (‘Pumpkinification’ of Claudius) and Thomas Biggs for Lucan's Bellum Civile (‘The Civil War’) that legal concepts – such as the emperor's judicial accountability for the Apocolocyntosis and iustitium (‘cessation of the legal’) for the Bellum Civile – can be intimately connected with a text's main agenda, affording important new interpretive insights. It also becomes clear that law itself is still a very broad concept that can range from questions of property or debt to natural law. There is thus certainly more work to be done in this area, and yet more to be gained from reading Latin texts with an eye on the fruitful interaction of law and literature. This volume definitely provides a very productive starting point.

An equally intriguing read is Basil Dufallo's book Disorienting Empire. Republican Latin Poetry's Wanderers, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in Republican Latin poetry, the Aeneid, and Latin literature in general.³ Dufallo traces the theme of ‘getting lost’ (expressed by such Latin terms as errare, palari, vagari, etc.) in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, in Lucretius, in Catullus, as well as in Horace's first book of Satires. He productively approaches the topic through the lens of Sarah Ahmed's ‘queerness’ theory,⁴ among others, which allows him to combine ideas of queerness, identity, disorientation, and Rome's imperial expansion. Yet, he is also alive to areas in which a theoretical framework that draws upon strands of postcolonialism falls short when studying the literature of ancient Rome; a city for which ‘the world of the Asiatic other is also the world of the non-Greek, proto-Roman self, and in a far more direct and concrete sense than Africa, India, or other areas colonized by modern Europeans were regarded as sites of European cultural origins’ (159). The book is certainly a model for future research along these lines, due to its very nuanced application of postcolonial ideas, which avoids any simple dichotomy of ‘victims’ and ‘conquerors’.

Dufallo's readings of the texts are highly insightful throughout. One of my personal highlights in the book is the chapter on Lucretius. Being on the path to truth in Lucretius, Dufallo shows, means to engage in purposeful wandering and to be able to recognize the natural motion of the atoms (referred to with terms such as vagus and vagari), thus avoiding both atomic and human ‘errors’ (errores). In particular, I enjoyed Dufallo's careful elucidation of the hymn to Venus at the opening of De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’). He argues that Venus’ procreative movements through the whole world set her apart from the aimless wandering of epic heroes such as Odysseus and her son Aeneas, who remain present as important intertextual foils throughout – a contrast that is also mirrored in the one between the beneficial journeys of Epicurus, Lucretius, and his addressee Memmius and those of the same epic heroes. In chapter 4, Dufallo examines the journeys and wandering portrayed in both the longer and shorter poems of Catullus and their links with Roman expansion in the Hellenic world, but also with the poet's craft itself. Finally, he ventures into the triumviral period (43–28 bc) with Horace's Satires 1. Again, he successfully traces the theme of erring and wandering in these poems – all confined to Rome and Italy, in contrast to the more far-flung wandering examined in the other chapters – to show how the amusing itineraries of their protagonists keep hinting at Octavian's growing power, associating him both with the sphere of the sacral and its playful demystification.

The key wanderers of Greek literature that stand behind the Latin texts – such as Odysseus, Bacchus, Cybele, or the Argonauts – keep making their appearance throughout the book, further underscoring the coherence of Dufallo's discussion. Throughout, he draws comparisons between the individual authors, at times also looking ahead to the Aeneid and the ‘imperial ideology’ that, as Dufallo remarks, is so strikingly absent from the Republican authors he studies. Dufallo is also very good at taking into account the political and historical background of the production of the texts – i.e., most importantly, the different stages of Roman expansion, but also the role played by wandering and migration in the lives of the poets themselves – and weaving it into his interpretations in a helpful way.

The epilogue is especially stimulating. Dufallo revisits the main chapters, thinking ahead to the Aeneid and reflecting on what else Aeneas could have been, given the image not only of Aeneas himself, but also of the figure of the wanderer in Republican literature. Aeneas too, Dufallo suggests, could have gone ‘off course’ and, like Plautus’ Menaechmi, ‘teamed up’ with doubles of himself, rather than distinguishing himself more and more from the people he encounters on his wanderings. The potentially comic side of a wandering figure like Odysseus could have been stressed, in the vein of Plautine comedy, as well as the potential similarity between Aeneas and Bacchus (although, as Dufallo notes, Aeneas was actually unsuccessful in the East before returning to his ancestral homeland in Italy). Vergil also gave new meaning to Lucretius’ more critical notion of heroic errores (‘wanderings/errors’) and rehabilitates the idea of the Mediterranean wanderer, compared with the itinerant characters portrayed by Catullus and the dangers inherent in this theme. Finally, Dufallo stresses that the idea of connecting the figure of the wanderer with the self-promotion of Octavian is one that Vergil, in essence, found prefigured in Horace's Satires. In conclusion, he intriguingly suggests that Vergil, rather than writing a Romuleid on Rome's ‘actual’ founder Romulus, could have been attracted to the figure of Aeneas precisely because of the very rich resonances of the itinerant hero in Republican poetry, which Dufallo elucidates in such a thought-provoking way, on the stimulating intellectual journey through which his book takes us.

Christopher S. van den Berg offers a compelling re-evaluation of Cicero's Brutus from a political, aesthetic, and intellectual perspective.⁵ Paying close attention to the specifics of language, imagery, and formal presentation, and to the recurrence of key ideas and motifs, he carefully examines the way Cicero, throughout the Brutus, meaningfully shapes, distorts, and manipulates his presentation of chronology and geography, the way he includes and excludes certain figures and arranges historical events. Cicero keeps creating meaningful coincidences, skilfully establishing his own place both as orator and literary historian in the history of Greco-Roman literature and oratory, even while he refuses to make himself the sole endpoint of all oratorical development. In eight chapters, van den Berg discusses Cicero's autobiographical account (‘Ciceropaideia’), the intellectual filiations of the Brutus, Cicero's political stance towards Caesar and the contemporary civic crisis as adumbrated in this dialogue, his approach to organizing and assessing the literary past, his account of the beginning of Rome's literary history, the normative framework that Cicero establishes for the writing of literary history, the debate over Atticism and Asianism, as well as Cicero's remarks on Caesar and his style and the visual analogies skilfully exploited by Cicero in order to implicitly challenge Caesar's military accomplishments and underscore his own civic achievements. What emerges very clearly is Cicero's ingenuity and novelty in creating what van den Berg fittingly terms ‘the invention of literary history’.

Throughout, van den Berg's discussion is thorough and nuanced, taking into account both the larger context of the Brutus and the way Cicero uses intricacies of style to underscore his argument. I was particularly struck by the discussion of how Cicero employs not only consular years, but also biological imagery, biographies, the tenure of political office, or the production of artworks in order to cleverly engineer the chronology of his account, in addition to shaping his presentation of the beginnings of Latin literature so as to carve out a particularly prominent place for himself in the history of oratory. My personal favourite among the eight chapters was the last: admitting that this chapter is the most ‘speculative’ of the book, van den Berg shows how Cicero implicitly equates himself with Phidias crafting the statue of the Parthenon Athena, while his description of Caesar's style in the commentarii de bello Gallico (‘Commentaries on the Gallic War’) corresponds to a statue of Venus, in particular Praxiteles' Aphrodite of Knidos. This fits in nicely with Cicero's larger political aims in the Brutus, as reconstructed by van den Berg. While I am not sure that I follow him in the final piece of speculation at the end of the chapter – that Vergil's failure to mention the Palladium in his depiction of Aeneas’ flight from Troy with Anchises and the Penates is a faint and sympathetic echo of Cicero's claims on Minerva – the chapter is still a highly fascinating exploration of the interplay of literature, art (painting and sculpture), style, and politics. I learned a lot from this book, not only about the sophistication and art of Cicero's Brutus, but also about the subtle means by which a literary history, or even a discourse of style, can at the same time be a political statement.

I also enjoyed Matthew Gorey's book on atomism in the Aeneid.⁶ Gorey is well aware of the work that has been done on Lucretius’ influence on Vergil, most notably by Philip Hardie,⁷ which he aims to take in a new direction. From the ‘remythologization’ identified by Hardie as the key feature of Vergil's engagement with Lucretius and atomistic philosophy, Gorey shifts the focus to a slightly different process that he sees at work alongside remythologization: again and again, those who oppose Aeneas’ mission and the birth of Rome are associated with atomism and disorder, which will ultimately be defeated by the forces of order and Roman teleology. After giving an overview of the research that has been done on Lucretian allusions in the Aeneid, Gorey discusses the Democritean origins of atomism and the Epicurean contributions to the debate, along with the hostile critique that atomism has received from philosophers, who, Gorey argues very interestingly, might very well have influenced Vergil in his reception of Lucretius. As a result, while Lucretius presents atoms as both creative and destructive, Vergil tendentiously only focuses on their disorderly and chaotic potential in his reception of the De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’). Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to ‘epic winners’ and ‘epic losers’; i.e., Trojans when they are faced by disasters such as the sea storm or the sack of Troy, which draw upon Lucretian images of cosmic and societal unravelling, and non-Trojans such as Dido, Turnus, and Mezentius, whose deaths are associated with the disorder and instability of atomic physics. This is followed by a chapter on the role played by atomic imagery in the final book of the Aeneid and in the encounter between Turnus and Eumedes as well as the duel between Aeneas and Turnus. While Aeneas’ victory marks the final defeat of the forces of disorder, Gorey nicely shows that the distinction between Turnus’ anti-Roman violence and the new political order founded by Aeneas is subtly undermined at the same time. The concluding chapter neatly summarizes the ideological significance of the Aeneid’s negative stance towards atomism.

Throughout, Gorey engages especially closely with Hardie's work on the topic, while successfully building his case for a reading that gives credit to those passages in the Aeneid in which Lucretian atomism is not inverted or rejected, but is rather presented independently, as a metaphor for disorder. He offers a series of close readings, often convincingly showing the presence of a Lucretian allusion where most previous scholars might have dismissed it – for instance, in his discussion of the expression nube cava (‘out of hollow cloud’) in Aen. 10.636, which, Gorey argues, evokes the tradition of philosophical speculation on the nature of clouds, or of the phrase nunc huc nunc illuc (‘now here, now there’), which, he shows, has an ‘atomic resonance’ as well. Gorey is also very good at offering nuanced analyses of the interplay of Lucretian and epic intertexts in the Aeneid.

Gorey's book is a very valuable addition to the scholarship on the Aeneid, and, in more general terms, the interplay of philosophy and literature, as this study makes it very clear that Vergil read the de rerum natura as both a literary text and firm part of the epic tradition, but also as a philosophical work. Gorey concludes that the tradition of Vergil's own strong ties with Epicurean philosophers in the Bay of Naples should probably be rejected, based on the way his Aeneid engages with Lucretius’ philosophy in a rather critical way. Finally, I was really intrigued by a remark that Gorey makes in passing (117, 119, n. 17): it looks as though, in later epic, what in Vergil is actually a reference to Epicurean philosophy, like the use of the word inane (‘void’), loses this philosophical tinge over time, being read by Vergil's epic successors merely as a hallmark of ‘generically epic language’. This seems to me a fascinating observation that will certainly deserve further study. Even beyond the directions for further research usefully singled out by Gorey himself in the concluding chapter, then, his book will certainly prove very valuable for future research on Lucretius’ influence on Vergil and beyond.

In the area of early imperial poetry, Maria Hirt presents a very thorough analysis of Ovid's presentation of festivals in his Fasti.⁸ Starting from a recapitulation of some of the key insights of narrative theory, which forms the methodological basis of her discussion, she examines the poet's role in the Fasti as spectator, as teacher (she distinguishes between the ‘assertive’ and ‘directive’ representation of festivals), and as one who has personal experience with some of the festivities (e.g. the Floralia as well as the festivals of Anna Perenna and Fors Fortuna). In the final section, she rather interestingly compares the representation of festivals and triumphs in Ovid's exile poetry with those of the Fasti. As Hirt says herself in the conclusion, there is certainly scope for weaving into this picture of festivals in the Fasti the presentation of festivals in Ovid's other works, which would provide further insights into how Ovid creates connections between his individual works while forging a complex ‘Gesamtwerk’ (‘collected works’).

There is much to praise in Hirt's meticulous analyses of the Fasti. In particular, she traces in great detail the interplay – already noted by Miller and others⁹ – of the poet's stance as the ‘master of ceremonies’ and a more detached didactic authority, who conveys information on the aetia of Roman festivals and rituals. I also liked the observation in the final chapter, that, in the Fasti, Ovid, though apparently present in Rome, only rarely engages directly with the festive proceedings, but usually acts as a passive spectator, while in a few cases in his exile poetry (e.g. Pont. 4.9), once he is no longer present in the city of Rome itself, he wishes that he could do so. Overall, however, Hirt's attention remains focused on the formal features of Ovid's presentation of festivals. Perhaps her discussion might have become a bit richer had she also kept an eye on the actual content of the sections that she analyses in detail, as well as their interplay with their context (along the lines of the ‘syntagmatic tensions’ that pervade the Fasti, as shown by Barchiesi and others).¹⁰ Hirt could certainly have taken her good work on the text quite a bit further and reflected more on the implications of her discussion: what does the poet's stance suggest about the political and religious impact of his work? Is Ovid, overall, firmly grounded in the tradition of didactic poetry and the didactic poet's relationship with his subject matter, or does something as novel as a calendar poem require a special ‘festive poetics’ that is different from anything known so far (while, of course, drawing on both the didactic tradition and Hellenistic ‘mimetic’ poetry)? With her monograph, Hirt certainly provides a thorough basis for further discussion.

From Ovid to one of his successors and, probably, admirers: Silius Italicus. Antony Augoustakis and R. Joy Littlewood offer the first full-scale English commentary on the third book of his Punica ¹¹ – the book in which, after the defeat of Saguntum, the Punic war fully gets under way with Hannibal's spectacular crossing of the Alps. In their introduction, Augoustakis and Littlewood set the scene very well, focusing on Silius’ presentation of Hannibal and the way it is shaped by the heroes Hercules and Aeneas, on Hannibal and his wife Imilce, on Hannibal's army, his alpine crossing, the role of divine prophecy in the third book, on Silius’ language and style, as well as (more briefly) the text and its transmission. Overall, they strike a good balance between the historical and literary aspects of Silius’ text. Maybe the position of Book 3 of the Punica within the epic as a whole could have been addressed a bit more explicitly, rather than in individual remarks dispersed throughout the introduction, to help those less familiar with the Punica find their way into this wonderful book. The text used for this commentary is that of Delz,¹² with just a few changes.

The translation they offer facing the text is very clear and fluent, with some elegant solutions for complex Latin expressions. At times, however, I felt that a bit more accuracy in rendering the Latin syntax could have helped to convey a few more of the intricacies of Silius’ style. To give but one small example: in 3.24–5, nec discolor ulli / ante aras cultus, rendered as ‘before the altar everyone wears the same clothes’, I was sorry to see the visual emphasis on colour go, reinforced by praefulget (translated as ‘distinctively adorned’) in the following line. But certainly some details inevitably have to go, and it is great to read Silius’ text in such wonderfully accessible English. The commentary is very good on the many layers of intertextual echoes and references, as well as intratextual connections between Book 3 and the rest of the Punica. It will greatly help both students and scholars alike to appreciate the literary merits of this book. While I sometimes wish that a little more attention could have been paid to the linguistic details of the text, this new commentary is still a very significant advancement for the study of Silius’ great epic.

I am afraid that I quite exactly resembled the type of reader that Andrea Lovato, Antonio Stramaglia, and Giusto Traina must have had mind when editing their impressive volume on Pseudo-Quintilian's Major Declamations in imperial Rome.¹³ I used indeed to think that these declamations were fun to read, but quite far removed from a precise historical or social reality. The editors and contributors to this volume show that this is quite wrong. The volume covers a very wide range of contributions, which show that the Major and some of the Minor Declamations are, actually, in close dialogue with declamatory and literary traditions (in particular Lucan and Seneca, but also Roman comedy and Sophoclean tragedy), with social history, the realities of the court, with rhetorical education, practice, as well as imagery and language, and that historians too should pay attention to the declamations and the insights they offer into Roman legal and social history. The declamations also engage with philosophy in their very own way, as Gernot Krapinger and Thomas Zinsmaier show in an intriguing and compelling piece, which even draws connections with present-day legal questions such as preventive detention and the suppositions that stand behind them (152). The transmission and Medieval reception of the Major Declamations is covered in the volume as well. Naturally, some of the Major Declamations feature more heavily than others (Decl. 4, 7, 10, 12, and 16, for instance), which is actually a virtue of the volume, as these are discussed from several different angles, and a couple of themes, such as torture or the role of the father, keep reappearing in different contexts.

My only quibble is with the arrangement of the individual contributions: these are ordered alphabetically by the name of their author, instead of being grouped in a more logical order. It might have been helpful, especially for readers less well-versed in the material, to start, for instance, with Biagio Santorelli's paper on the dating of the declamations, as well as the contributions by Giovanna Longo and Mario Lentano that deal with the dating and the compilation of the collection, so as to clarify the chronological basis for the discussions to follow. This would also have helped to foreground and address a methodological issue in the study of the very varied body of Pseudo-Quintilian declamations, which, as Santorelli shows, span more than a century, from the early second to the middle of the third century or even slightly later: due to the nature and limitations of our sources, we are able to assess the contemporary background for some better than for others. All papers in the volume, however, are based on close and insightful work with the texts, and between them, a vivid picture emerges of the Major Declamations and their dialogue with each other and with their world. Whether you come to these texts with the same (unfounded) stereotypes as I did or not, the volume is highly recommended!

Moving on to the second century and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, we come to Evelyn Adkins’ book on ‘discourse, knowledge, and power’ in this work.¹⁴ Drawing on approaches from fields such as sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, Adkins focuses on the role of discourse, broadly defined to include verbal and nonverbal communication, as the primary tool for the negotiation of social and power relations in a novel that is almost obsessed with speech, its interpretation or misinterpretation, knowledge, identity, and power, and in which these issues are constantly presented with great wit and powerful comic effects. Adkins’ book consists of six chapters, in which she carefully analyses ‘discourse from the margins’, e.g. of the priests of the Syrian goddess or the band of robbers, ‘elite discourse’, such as that of Thelyphron, Lucius’ discursive negotiations of status and identity in his private encounters with others, the feminine discourse of Byrrhenna, Photis, the Corinthian matron, and Isis, as well as the binaries of talkativeness and silence, magic and the divine, and curiosity and revelation, including in the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche. The final chapter is devoted to a reading of the Metamorphoses itself as discourse. This leads quite organically into the book's conclusion, in which Adkins convincingly suggests that the Metamorphoses themselves formed one component of Apuleius’ self-fashioning and the negotiation of his own identity, status, and power.

Adkins is very good at contextualizing her discussion in the role played by speech and silence for negotiations of identity and relations of status and power in second-century Roman society. Where relevant, she also compares Apuleius’ Metamorphoses with its Greek model, the Onos (‘Ass’), successfully showing that to the Roman novelist, issues of speech, social standing, and power are much more important than to his Greek predecessor. While no single book will be able to provide the one authoritative interpretation of this notoriously multi-layered and witty text, the framework chosen by Adkins for her reading of the Metamorphoses functions very well and makes her book a welcome addition to the scholarship on Apuleius.

The reception of Latin texts in late antiquity too is fascinating, as Daniel Vallat shows in the volume that he has edited on the reception of the speeches of Vergil's Aeneid among his commentators and exegetes in the fourth and fifth centuries ad.¹⁵ The starting point of the volume, as Vallat outlines in the introduction, is the paradoxical fact that, while Vergil himself was not an orator but a poet, the speeches in his work began to be viewed, probably from the beginning of the second century ad onwards, as models of eloquence. The volume very successfully traces this feature of the late antique reception of Vergil, covering the exegetical tradition on a wide range of speeches in the Aeneid, such as those in the first book, the speeches by female deities, especially Juno and Venus, the prophetic speeches of Anchises in Book 3, the speeches by Diomedes and Drances, as well as deceptive speeches or speeches expressing love and affection.

Several contributions start by outlining the relevant bits of ancient rhetorical theory and how they were received by the commentators and exegetes. A stimulating picture emerges of the similarities and differences in the exegetical approaches of Servius with Servius Danielis and Claudius Donatus. Macrobius’ Saturnalia and Donatus’ commentary on Terence are covered as well, and Martin Bažil shows in his extremely interesting contribution that, beyond the mere use of Vergilian words, lines, and half-lines, the literary techniques of Vergilian speeches influenced Proba's use of direct speeches in her famous Cento. While I thought that there could have been a bit more cross-referencing between the individual contributions, the volume still succeeds at drawing the bigger picture of the way ancient rhetoric found its way into late antique commentaries and determined the way the Aeneid was read in late antiquity, which indicates the central importance of Vergil in late antique education. The volume is also a powerful reminder of the differences between the individual commentators, in how they approached the figure of Aeneas, Vergilian rhetoric, and the poet's art.

Finally, I come to something a bit different, but no less intriguing: a collaborative edition, for use in schools, of a fifteenth-century Latin text, the Defense of Eve, by a female author from Verona, Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466).¹⁶ The text is the product of an exchange of letters, later edited for publication by Nogarola, between herself and Ludovico Foscarini (1409–1480), who came to govern Verona on behalf of Venice in 1451. While there had been a long tradition, ever since Tertullian, of blaming Eve for Original Sin, which was often interpreted as a sign of women's inferiority and a justification for their subordinate role in society, Nogarola argues that Adam's sin was greater than Eve's. The edition of the text presented here is geared towards students of Latin, and it comes equipped with running vocabulary (covering any words that go beyond the 250 most frequent Latin words, which are listed as a glossary at the end of the volume) and a commentary, which provides help with Latin grammar, gives guidance on characteristic features of post-classical Latin, and even identifies a couple of new quotations of prior authors. The introduction does a very good job at setting the scene for the text, providing information on its Humanistic background, including the antisemitism that was pervasive in Christian communities at the time and that is reflected in the text as well. The editors emphasize the importance of the Defense of Eve as a key text in the history of ‘protofeminism’, and in the history of gender and society more generally.

The text, given its background and importance that the introduction establishes so well, should be a highly appealing read for students, well repaying the effort of familiarizing themselves with post-classical Latin. It is not always exactly an easy read, though. Many of the arguments exchanged hinge on fine details of the interpretation of the biblical text – as such, reading the Defense of Eve should also be a very good lesson for students on the value and power that lies in a detailed understanding of texts, language, and even the precise meaning of an individual word. The edition is itself the product of a fascinating project: as the introduction explains, it was co-produced by Thomas G. Hendrickson and seven of his students as part of an advanced Latin course offered by Stanford Online High School in 2021–2. This fact in itself will certainly give added motivation to the students working with the text and will hopefully inspire other projects of this kind in the future.