Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America

Ancients, Moderns, and the Progress of Mankind: Thomas Jefferson’s Classical World

2 35 T homas jefferson’s lifelong love of the ancient languages was extraordinary, even by the standards of a self-consciously neoclassical age that linked genteel social status to classical learning. Reading “the Latin & Greek authors in their original, is a sublime luxury,” Jefferson wrote Joseph Priestley in 1800, the year in which a great electoral “revolution” would redeem the new republic and make him president.1 One of the great joys of his retirement years was to return to the classics. The philosophers—particularly Epicurus and the Stoic Epictetus—provided “delights” and “consolations” for an old man whose “business” it was “to beguile the wearisomeness of declining life.”2 Jefferson’s deepest satisfaction came from the ancients’ languages, not the wisdom of their philosophers. “Among the values of classical learning,” he told correspondent John Brazier in 1819, “I estimate the luxury of reading the Greek and Roman authors in all the beauties of their originals.”3 The ancients had established the foundations of modern knowledge in all fields. But they could provide little guidance to the “business” of rising generations who stood on “the shoulders of a Demosthenes or Cicero, of a Locke or Bacon, or a Newton” and looked to the future.4 Jefferson’s love of the classics was shaped by recollections of his childhood and of his debts to his father, Peter Jefferson. Son Thomas reckoned that indebtedness not in terms of land or slaves, but rather in terms of the classical education that his modestly educated father afforded him. “I thank on my knees him who directed my early education,” he told Priestley, for his father had “put Ancients, Moderns, and the Progress of Mankind Thomas Jefferson’s Classical World peter s. onuf 36 Peter S. Onuf into my possession this rich source of delight; and I would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, & have not since acquired.”5 Many years later, he elaborated this theme to Brazier: “I think myself more indebted to my father for this than for all the other luxuries his cares and affections have placed within my reach; and more now than when younger, and more susceptible of delights from other sources.”6 Jefferson returned to the classics, acknowledging his debt to his father— and to the ancients—as he contemplated his own death. As the “useful energies ” of his mind diminished, “the classic pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all sooner or latertodescend.”7 Atsuchmoments,worldly,“useful”thingsnolongersignified. Jefferson could instead contemplate his life in the broader scheme of history, as each succeeding generation asserted its “sovereignty” over creation. The dead could not rule from the grave—this was the perverted premise of aristocratic regimes—but the sons of the living generation in a free republic owed a debt of gratitude and love to their fathers for the legacy of freedom they enjoyed.8 Life moved cyclically for Jefferson, with the diminishing capacities of his later years offering a reverse, mirror image of his youth. He associated his mastery of the classical languages with his father’s love, an attachment that transcended the generations without compromising the integrity or independence of the living. For Jefferson, this was the crucial corollary of majority rule, “the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.”9 The “parent” of freedom was the self-limitation of past generations. A republican majority could only bind itself, not those who followed. Between “generation and generation there is no municipal obligation,” Jefferson told James Madison. “By the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another.” Like individuals, generations thus passed through a life cycle, rising to maturity and the exercise of their full powers before retiring gracefully, for “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”10 That the history of peoples and their governments was cyclical was a standard premise of early modern historiography. The Enlightenment idea of progress through time, toward ever higher stages of civilization, defied the logic of everyday experience, its dark counterpoint.11 As Jefferson recognized, the hopes he shared with John Adams and his fellow founders, “for splendid improve- Ancients, Moderns, and the Progress of Mankind 37 ments in human society, and vast amelioration in the condition of mankind,” were ultimately...