Along with his many other accomplishments, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), diplomat, architect, scientist, and third president of the United States, was a classical scholar who collected numerous editions of ancient Greek and Latin texts. Among these, he owned at least two copies of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a biographical novel written in Greek about the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great (circa 600 – 530 BCE).
Xenophon was a student of Socrates and a historian who lived in Athens from approximately 430 to around 355 BCE. In about 370 BCE he wrote the Cyropaedia. It was not only a history, but a vehicle for the philosopher to expound on many topics including education, forms of government, and the military; in fact, many believe it was written in response to The Republic of Plato (a work Jefferson also owned).
In more modern times, the Cyropaedia had a strong influence on Niccoló Machiavelli’s The Prince and on later political philosophers during the Enlightenment, including Jefferson. The work was also considered a useful teaching text for reading prose in Attic Greek, the Athenian dialect used for many important works of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.
Of Jefferson’s two copies of the Cyropaedia that came to the Library in 1815, only one still exists: a bilingual Greek and Latin edition printed in Glasgow in 1767 by Robert and Andrew Foulis. The Foulis Press was widely known for printing impeccable editions of classical texts. The Library recently digitized this copy, which displays proof of Jefferson’s careful reading. On page 214, Jefferson neatly crossed out two lines of Greek text.
Jefferson’s bibliographer, Millicent Sowerby, in her famous Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, records this unusual instance of Jefferson’s annotation as: “a few small corrections in ink” (see item J.22). However, she provides no context. What was Jefferson editing and why?
At first glance, a reader might think that Jefferson disagreed with these lines, but, upon closer examination, we can see that the strikethrough is placed on a typographical error in the text, which repeats the previous nine words. In rare book librarianship, this kind of compositional error is called dittography. So, Jefferson did not cross out the line because he thought it apocryphal or because he didn’t agree with it. He was merely correcting a fastidious printer’s uncharacteristic mistake.
Jefferson is not known for annotating the volumes in his library. Though he frequently corrected little misprints and editorial errors in his Greek and Latin texts, he rarely made such annotations in his English books. The Thomas Jefferson Library is one of the treasures of the Library of Congress and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and more information about its history is available through the Thomas Jefferson Library Collection Resource Guide.
Sources
Millicent E. Sowerby. Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson. (Washington, D.C. : The Library of Congress, 1952-59).
The Oxford classical dictionary. Edited by M. Cary, et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).
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