A collection of essays written by leading early American scholars and edited by two highly respected Jeffersonian experts offer readers an opportunity to reexamine not only our understanding of Thomas Jefferson but also the impact of classicism in the development of the American republic. Far from a consensus, the prologue and ten essays depict dissension amongst the contributors in assessing the importance of classicism in such a process. Historians have polarized on the question of classical “influence” since Gilbert Chinard (in the 1920s) discovered the ubiquity of classical allusions in Jefferson's writings. In the following decades, scholars broadened their inquiries to produce a paradigm – led by Richard Gummere, Hannah Arendt, and others – that maintained that classicism had played a “formative” role in the development of America. Meanwhile, revisionist historians – led by Clinton Rossiter, Bernard Bailyn, and others – developed a competing perspective, the extreme of which suggests that classicism provided intellectual “window dressing” for educated Americans, privileging instead Whig ideology (as especially mediated through Renaissance and Enlightenment texts). The essays in this volume are indicative of the historical trend since that time to account for the impact of multiple traditions, change over space and time, and Americans’ direct and indirect engagement with (and understanding of) the Classics.

Gordon Wood's essay (a précis of his most important contributions to his craft) offers the historiographical context for the volume, demonstrating that classicism is inherent in modern European discourses about republicanism, which became central for American political thought. Questioning Wood's assessment and the centrality of antiquity in Jefferson's thinking, however, Peter Onuf and Michael Zuckert delve into Jefferson's engagement with classical texts. Onuf argues that Jefferson believed republicanism in America to be quite different to any experiment ever attempted, thus Jefferson rejected classical political theory as an exemplar for American republicanism. Likewise, Zuckert concludes that Jefferson's sense of morality is influenced as much by modern traditions as by ancient ones. Taking into account change over time and the impact of multiple traditions more broadly conceived, Nicholas Cole and Peter Thompson question the formative role of classicism in American political thought. The former rightly suggests that the “influence” of classicism for Americans changed based on historical contexts, while the latter demonstrates that colonial Virginians, including Jefferson, sought models for emulation not in antiquity but in Anglo-Saxonism. Likewise, Eran Shalev notes Jefferson's use of the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the years 1774–76, arguing that Jefferson deliberately chose not to use his classical knowledge to support American independence, because he saw the Classics as a source of “intellectual delight” in his private sociocultural sphere rather than as a source of utility for his public sociopolitical sphere. Shalev, however, seemed to disregard the impact of Ciceronian natural law in Jefferson's thinking as he penned his greatest intellectual achievement: the Declaration of Independence. Nonetheless, these scholars suggest that Jefferson (ever the optimistic visionary) recognized the uniqueness of the American experiment, thus he looked to modernity and the future for inspiration and support more than to the classical past.

Embracing the formative paradigm, or the centrality of the classical tradition in American thinking, Caroline Winterer explores Jefferson's relationships with women in his own family, arguing that Jefferson's concern for instilling a classical education into the women at Monticello is a reflection of a broader trend at that time of defining gender roles in the years following the Revolution. Likewise, Richard Guy Wilson delves into Jefferson's fascination with classical architecture. Although Wilson admits that Jefferson gained a refracted image of classical architecture from the Renaissance architect Palladio, he maintains that it nevertheless provided a foundation for the neoclassical style indicative of Jefferson's public and private architectural projects. Similarly, Maurie McInnis points out that Jefferson sought to use classical imagery – of George Washington as Cincinnatus, defender of republicanism – to memorialize Washington's legacy, a trend that evolved in the antebellum period as Virginians began to compare Washington with Marcus Aurelius, defender not of republicanism but of Virginia's constitutional rights. Paul Rahe, while recognizing Anglo-American critiques of Cicero and classical republicanism, nevertheless concludes that “those who have argued that the writers of classical antiquity were brought in as mere window dressing are clearly wrong,” precisely because ancient writers kept “alive the memory of self-government through a long epoch in which despotism was the norm” (256).

Is the use of classicism by early Americans a formative paradigm or merely illustrative of a descriptive language employed to explain modern revolutionary situations? Attempting to answer the question of “influence,” these essays reflect the methodological problems of assessing the impact of classical writers (and their ideas) upon generations of people far removed from them. In the end, scholars will make up their own minds with regard to the “influence” of classicism. Nonetheless, Jennifer Roberts, in perhaps the most methodologically provocative essay in the collection, traced the modern reception of the Thucydidean Pericles. Most important, Roberts, rather than asking if Americans were “influenced” by classicism, asked instead what Americans’ engagement with antiquity reveals about modern “developments in contemporary history and ideology,” concluding that as American thinking evolved, so too did Americans’ interpretation of Pericles (266). To be sure, Roberts offers scholars a unique methodological approach for investigating the modern reception of antiquity, thereby pointing the way for future scholarship in this field.