Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America

Introduction

2 1 I t is no accident that that the first conference in many years to bring together a group of scholars working on American interest in the classical worldatthebeginningofAmericanIndependenceshouldfocusonThomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s own views on the value of classical learning were complex. Scholars have long recognized that the classics were important to Jefferson in very many ways, even as he proclaimed their utter irrelevance in others. The same might be said for the broader interest of his generation in the texts of ancient authors and the history of the ancient states. Characterizing the significanceoftheclassicsforeitherJeffersonorhisgenerationrepresentsacontinuing challenge to scholarship. What, after all, does it mean to speak of the “influence ” of classical writers—or indeed, of any cohort of writers—on succeeding generations, increasingly far removed from them in time and space? This is the question addressed in this volume, through a wide variety of approaches. Jefferson never wrote under the classical pseudonyms adopted by Hamilton and so many others of his generation,1 and he certainly never wrote at the same length about the ancient world as John Adams.2 His comments on the classics tended to be more fleeting than those of many others. Yet, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, Jefferson’s apparently contradictory attitudes toward the classics reward closer examination. As a problem for all history of political thought, “influence” may not be easy to assess, and in Jefferson’s case it certainly resists glib generalization. But Jefferson’s various uses of the classics , and even his neglect of them, at different moments in his private life and Introduction 2 Introduction public career, offer illuminating clues to the problem of influence and reception in Jefferson’s world. Classical works formed the foundation of all of Jefferson’s libraries, and he repeatedly urged correspondents to make classical learning the foundation for the study of nearly all arts and sciences in republican America.3 In the curricular wars of his age he was an eloquent exponent of ancient languages, resisting calls to revolutionize the curriculum.4 He wrote movingly of his love for classical literature and his gratitude that he was able to enjoy the ancient texts in their original languages. Unlike his friend and rival Adams, who struggled with Greek, Jefferson was a fluent reader of both Latin and Greek. Jefferson’s debts to the ancients were not confined to language and literature. His interest in classical architecture produced not only his own private residences but helped to give American public and university architecture its classical tone.5 Yet it was this same Jefferson who wrote some of the clearest denunciations of his generation’s reliance on the classics. He believed it would be a tragic mistake for his countrymen to turn to the ancients for inspiration as they founded their new republics and drafted their own constitutions. That his fellow Virginians would even consider resigning their liberties to a wartime dictator, on the Roman model, represented an appalling lapse of judgment. As he argued in his Notes on the State of Virginia, the lessons of Rome were worse than irrelevant in the modern republican context.6 Jefferson returned to this theme repeatedly in later writings: the modern state was so fundamentally different from the ancient in so many ways that comparing the two could yield absolutely no insight. The same man who claimed the classics as the root of most knowledge was himself content if ancient writings on government had been lost.7 Though Jefferson was a great reader of the classics, he differed from most of his contemporaries in his refusal to draw political lessons from ancient history. Even beyond the realm of high politics and constitutional thought, it is difficult to find a secure place for the classics in Jefferson’s thought. It is clear that he read widely, not only classical texts themselves but a variety of translations and more modern works about the ancient world. His commonplace book attests that as a student, and later in life, he read widely and carefully. Entries from Herodotus, Livy, Homer, Euripides, and a host of other classical authors make up much of the work. Others contain comments on ancient law, custom, Introduction 3 or history. The earliest entries are classical, as is what appears to have been the final entry, a few lines from Quintus Smyrnaeus that Jefferson appears to have intended as a valediction.8 Many of these entries reflect Jefferson’s...