Announcing the Beginning of a Roman Perseus

The Perseus Project has received a grant of $180,000 in outright support and $35,000 in matching funds from the Teaching with Technology Program at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH also provided comparable support to the VRoma project, which will be developing a virtual community for the teaching of classics. The two efforts are closely interlinked -- the data that Roman Perseus assembles will provide a foundation on which VRoma can build.

The Roman Perseus grant will allow us to begin extending our coverage to Roman civilization. The primary chronological focus of our work will extend through the Augustan period, with a secondary emphasis on the Julio-Claudians. Later phases of work will extend our coverage farther in time.

Over the course of the coming three years, we plan to make available:

• New photography of Roman art utilizing, where appropriate, Quicktime VR for dynamic "panoramas" and rotations of objects in space.

• A central location for storing images and links to images elsewhere on the WWW illustrating Roman civilization.

• A reference library of Latin Texts and English translations with the full complement of textual tools developed for Greek Perseus: e.g. Latin Aeneid.

• Commentaries: e.g. Catullus with Merrill's Commentary.

• Lexica: the full Lewis and Short Latin Lexicon: e.g. the entry for cano.

• Shakespeare's Roman Plays and North's Plutarch, with hypertextual links between the plays and source passsages.

• New photography of Roman art and archaeology

• A GIS-based atlas of the Roman world

• Development of 3D virtual walkthroughs of selected spaces in the Roman world

• Collaboratively developed standards for the publication of new materials -- from archaeological reports to museum catalogues to new translations, editions and commentaries