Examining Possible Influences of the Classics on Early American Leaders

On October 13 and 14, 2008, a renowned group of scholars representing the academic disciplines of art, art history, classics, history, and political science convened at the American Academy in Rome in order to discuss the influence of the classical world—especially Greek and Roman texts and artistic forms—on early American leaders. Taken together, the authors of this resulting collection seem to agree to disagree on the extent to which individuals like Thomas Jefferson drew lessons from the classics, ranging from "prescriptive" to "merely illustrative" (p. ix) or—as with many of them—a complex mixture of both.

Three of the essays focus specifically on Jefferson: Peter Onuf's "Ancients, Moderns, and the Progress of Mankind: Thomas Jefferson's Classical World"; Caroline Winterer's "Classical Taste at Monticello: The Case of Thomas Jefferson's Daughter and Granddaughters"; and Richard Guy Wilson's "Thomas Jefferson's Classical Architecture: An American Agenda." Two prominently feature him in relation to others: Maurie D. McInnis' "George Washington: Cincinnatus or Marcus Aurelius?" and Eran Shalev's "Thomas Jefferson's Classical Silence, 1774-1776: Historical Consciousness and Roman History in the Revolutionary South." Onuf and Shalev share the perspective that Jefferson loved the classics—especially in their original languages—but did not draw practical applications from what he read. In Onuf's words, "Jefferson's deepest satisfaction came from the ancients' languages, not the wisdom of the philosophers" (p. 35). In Shalev's, Jefferson "saw the classics as a comforting luxury, a source of cerebral pleasure, and a symbol of social and intellectual status" (p. 238). When it came to politics, especially, the authors concur that Jefferson saw little to be gained from reading the classics because Americans were grounding their new country's government on people's ability to break from the past and chart new pathways to the future. Key to this transformation would be devising how to create a republican form of government based on federalism and progressivism. According to Shalev, "Classical antiquity was irrelevant to what Jefferson considered the American—exceptional—situation" (p. 242).

Perhaps because their essays are more specific in their treatments of Jefferson's use of the classics, Winterer and Wilson find evidence that he borrowed directly from them as he fashioned an educational model for his daughters and granddaughters and when he designed buildings. Winterer emphasizes that Jefferson relied on the classics as a way of cultivating the development of "women of taste and learning" (p. 81). From his travels in Europe, Jefferson saw a world "that was palpably physical and enhanced by the delights of polite society" (p. 84), and the objects that he shipped back to Monticello formed the nucleus of the world he envisioned for the females in his family. In Winterer's view, Ellen Randolph Coolidge and her sisters were eventually able to break the bands of tradition and leverage their classical upbringings to achieve parity—in at least this one area—with the schooling that men of the time received.

For his part, Wilson emphasizes that Jefferson employed mathematical proportions and hierarchies that he learned from the classics in his architectural styles: "Jefferson looked very closely at classical precedent and usually followed the rules" (p. 109). Not only did Jefferson rarely deviate from the geometry, composition, and proportion of classical models, but also he wanted his creations to inspire and instruct, as with his design of ten different facades for the professors' pavilions adjacent to the lawn at the University of Virginia. Indeed, he helped produce "a cadre of trained architects and workers who could design and build" in the style of classical architectural forms as resurrected by the treatises of Giacomo Leoni and Charles Errand and Roland Freart de Chambray (p. 121).

Two additional essays address the influence of the classics on Jefferson less directly. Michael P. Zuckert's essay mentions Jefferson in the title, but it is less about Jefferson and the classics...