Early on a Tuesday morning, in a classroom on the top floor of Fox Hall, about a dozen of Randolph-Macon College’s best Latin students are split into small groups engaged in discussion, with large volumes in a variety of languages spread across the desks.

Associate Professor Bart Natoli, the Chair of RMC’s Classics Department, bounces between the groups, comparing adjectives with one and referencing the Oxford Latin dictionary for long marks with another. While most college courses follow a syllabus through a textbook, this class is doing the opposite: they’re writing the textbook.

The textbook’s subject is Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi by Faltonia Betitia Proba. Proba lived in the fourth century and is notable as one of the earliest female Christian poets. A cento is a poetical work composed entirely of verses from other authors, rearranged in a new order. Although the practice is uncommon in modern literature, the spirit is similar to a music producer sampling existing tracks to create entirely new beats and songs.

“She took probably the most famous Latin poem at the time, which was Virgil’s Aeneid, a pagan poem from around 19 B.C.E., and rearranged all of the lines to tell the story of Christianity, from the beginnings of the creation all the way to the ascension of Jesus,” explained Natoli.

Ancient women writers have been an area of professional focus for Natoli, who co-authored Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome in 2022. With Proba’s work left on the cutting room floor for that textbook project, he knew he wanted to return to the subject. While there are existing English translations of Proba’s Cento, all commentaries of the work are in German or Italian.

Natoli and his students have set out to create an English-language commentary and analysis in the form of a textbook to be used in high school and college classrooms. They’ll deliver their final product to a publisher by the end of July, and the students will all be listed as co-authors.

The work started last spring and summer. With a grant from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS), Taylor Bennett ’25, Aryn Hanna ’24, Ellen Stark ’25, and Jacob Williams ‘27 worked to take the 100 ancient manuscripts of Proba and pull them into one consistent text with an accompanying glossary. This spring, the special topics class is working through the 694 lines of text, operating both individually and in groups to annotate and analyze.

“We have 14 students in the class. I thought with that much horsepower, you could divide and conquer pretty well,” Natoli said. “This particular group is very experienced.”

The final step will take place this summer, with Bennett and Hanna (currently a graduate student at the University of Georgia) editing the complete work into one coherent voice. The course has inspired offshoot projects as well, with Maddy Jones ’27 and Maille Carrington ’26 working on SURF research this summer exploring different aspects of Proba.

“I’ve been doing Latin for over a decade. I started in middle school, continued through high school, and in high school I really started to feel like I had a connection with the language and literature,” Bennett explained. “There are so many things that you can do in Latin that you can’t do in English that just makes the language so beautiful. Once you know all the rules, it’s like putting together a puzzle.”

Working on this project collaboratively has also provided a different perspective.

“Most of the students in the class have taken quite a few advanced Latin classes, but there are some who are less experienced, and I feel like their insight is honestly the most valuable,” Bennett said. “The people who are learning ask the questions that need to be answered.”

Bennett has worked on this project since last year, helping to set the text, and now analyzing it. She also presented the work with Natoli this March at CAMWS’ Annual Meeting at the University of Illinois. With an acceptance to Florida State University to pursue a master’s in Greek and Latin, Bennett explains that the Proba project has been a great way to get hands-on experience in the field as an undergraduate.

“I’m pretty excited to be published, especially because I want to have a future in this field,” Bennett said. “Getting my foot in the door, having a publication out with my name on it, it’s really important.”

As the students collaborate to piece together the puzzle of Proba’s Cento, they are experiencing firsthand the work of professional classicists and academics. Natoli emphasizes that the work is real, with no safety nets. “There’s no commentary that you can go and ask questions of; they have to come up with the answers themselves.”