Aeschylus, Bookplates, and Jefferson’s Conception of an Enlightened Aristocracy

Abstract: This piece contextualizes the production of a bookplate by George Wythe and Thomas Jefferson within Jefferson’s philosophy concerning public education. Wythe and Jefferson discuss the bookplate in their correspondences. The bookplate features a passage from the Greek tragedian Aeschylus. The founding fathers’ discussion over the quotation that should go on the bookplate illuminates their attitudes toward Greek comprehension among Virginia’s educated class. Jefferson shortens the quotation, assuming that any reader of the imprint made by the bookplate would be able to supply Aeschylus’s missing words. This elision reveals that Jefferson assumes a high level of Greek comprehension and knowledge of Greek literature among the viewers of the imprints made by the bookplate. The piece argues that such choices over the bookplate also reflect the importance of Greek learning in Jefferson’s education plan. In Jefferson’s proposal for Virginia public education, Greek education begins in grammar schools attended by only the boys from rich families who could afford the tuition and a select few poor boys on scholarship. Thus, in Jefferson’s scheme, Greek education becomes an institutionalized piece of cultural capital, enjoyed and shared by the aristocracy. This piece reads the bookplate as an artifact of Jefferson’s failed plan to make a classical education ubiquitous among the Virginia aristocracy. Jefferson intended and failed to extend the classical education of his own cultural milieu, all members of which he assumed would recognize the Aeschylus passage immediately, to the entire Virginia aristocracy.