Classical Slavery and Jeffersonian Racism
Charlottesville, One Year Later
Andrew Shurtleff’s photograph of torch-wielding white supremacists at the University of Virginia on August 11, 2017 immediately became one of the most iconic images of the violent two-day white supremacist rally that left three people dead, dozens injured, and a community traumatized. Behind the torch-lit faces stands a looming structure with features that will be familiar to students and scholars of Greek and Roman antiquity: hexastyle portico, Corinthian columns, entablature, pediment. Thomas Jefferson designed the Rotunda himself, modeling it on the Pantheon, and it is now the focal point of UVA’s campus and, according to many, an architectural masterpiece. So the photograph centers what we might call the early American reception of classical architecture behind a white supremacist mob.
This disturbing formulation invites us to reflect on the deep connection between white supremacy and the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity, which is present in UVA’s design thanks to its most famous founder: the polymath Jefferson. The architecture of UVA’s campus, along with Jefferson’s residence at Monticello, is easily the most visible manifestation of his fascination with Greek and Roman antiquity. Jefferson’s UVA has the domed Rotunda, flanked by two colonnades of student dormitories and faculty housing. Like Monticello, what Jefferson called the “Academical Village” resembles a Roman villa, or even a forum, in his signature neoclassical style: white columns in front of red bricks. Roman grandeur meets the red clay of the Virginia piedmont.
White supremacy defined both form and function in the construction of the Academical Village. The structures were meant to encompass the entirety of students’ lives at the university, most of whom, as white sons of the white planting class, were heavily dependent on the enslavement of African-Americans. As with Monticello, Jefferson’s building program at UVA was dependent on the creativity and efforts of enslaved African-Americans—in this case, those who both built and maintained the Academical Village. For Jefferson, Greek and Roman antiquity provided a set of symbols for consolidating the identity of elite white males.
I was about to start my final year as a doctoral student in Classics at UVA when I missed walking into that torch rally by maybe an hour. That muggy August evening, as the sun sank low through an overcast sky, I walked the length of the Academical Village from the Classics department, through the porticos and past the Rotunda — my usual route toward my car — not knowing that my steps prefigured those of the torch-bearers. These spaces and others downtown still feel haunted after nearly a year. The torch rally brought to the surface a truth that a lot white people around here, myself included, failed (or refused) to recognize, but many people of color knew all along: white supremacy has always lurked in these spaces. And if we take a look at how white supremacy figured into Jefferson’s life and career, it is clear that the study of Greek and Roman antiquity is implicated as well.
I have heard Jefferson credited with founding UVA from the first time I set foot on the campus as a prospective graduate student, and many times since. He stamped his name on the university and had it stick, much like the Declaration of Independence. In reality, he was but one of many collaborators. This began formally when the Virginia General Assembly authorized the creation of UVA in 1818 as one of the nation’s first public universities and appointed a board of commissioners to determine its logistical details. The commissioners, including Jefferson and James Madison, published their decisions in a document known as the Rockfish Gap Report. It’s a fascinating treatise on the value of publicly funded higher education — and heavily laced with white supremacy. If Jefferson wants credit for being the “Father of the University of Virginia,” then he has to own the good and the bad of what that means.
Some of the language of the Report suggests something like a democratization of learning in the creation of UVA. It also makes it clear, however, that the university was not really meant for the (white, male) masses, but for a select few who had attained a degree of competence in Greek and Latin at secondary schools: the “classical learning” of these young men was to be “critically compleated [sic]” and “finished.” Elementary Greek and Latin thus served as gatekeepers to the university, while their advanced study conferred finish upon a subset of elite white men. The report further indicates that UVA was conceived at least in part as a training ground for statesmen. White, male, and educated to completion in the classical tradition, these UVA alumni were to hold positions of power in a Virginia which, as historian Annette Gordon-Reed has demonstrated, can accurately be described as a white supremacist regime.
We might wonder what use Jefferson, as a co-author of the Report, saw in classical learning for white male leaders. He provides answers in some of his letters, where he comments on the utility of Greek and Latin authors as models of prose style, ethical guidance, and a Christianity uncorrupted by centuries of church apparatus. While all of these claims are questionable, one specific instance of how Jefferson himself used Greek and Latin during his storied career is especially disturbing. This is the infamous Query XIV of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he lays out his belief in the inherent supremacy of white people and inferiority of black people.
In 1780, when the Revolution was still underway, Jefferson, then the Governor of Virginia, composed Notes as a series of answers to the questions that French diplomat François Marbois posed to the Continental Congress. It’s a book-length ethnography and geography of Virginia from his point of view. Though Query XIV is ostensibly about the state’s laws, it also contains a lengthy digression about race that leaves little doubt about Jefferson’s racism.
Jefferson’s argument for white supremacy in Query XIV is often described as an exercise in pseudoscience, including in a piece by physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein that Denise Eileen McCoskey cited recently in Eidolon. Despite this characterization, Jefferson concludes Query XIV with the regret that no formal science (“natural history”) of race exists to test his beliefs, though he also clearly expects future scientists to confirm them. In other words, Jefferson does not make his argument primarily on the basis of biology, as two centuries (and counting) of white supremacists have.
His largest body of evidence, however, is drawn from Greek and Latin texts. Jefferson’s approach purports to be historical rather than scientific, and the basis of his authority is his classical learning. His argument goes like this: slavery in Roman antiquity was crueler than slavery in the New World. Slaves in the Roman world were white. White slaves in the Roman world included artistic and scientific geniuses, unlike contemporary black slaves. It is thus not the condition of slavery that results in the alleged artistic and scientific inferiority of black slaves, but the natural condition of their race. Therefore, white people are inherently superior to black people.
Jefferson is wrong on every point in this argument. But rather than dignifying his overtly racist assertions by refuting them, I will focus on how Jefferson engages in pseudo-history to make his case. This is consistent with David Weimer’s argument that Jefferson’s careless quotations of Greek in Notes are bound up with his construction of racial identities. Let’s call that pseudo-philology. Jefferson’s pseudo-historical use of passages and vignettes from Greek and Latin literature — his citations as well as his interpretations — is highly selective. The works cited include both Cato’s De Agri Cultura and Plutarch’s Life of Cato on Cato the Elder. Jefferson also mentions the infamous Vedius Pollio, who attempted to throw a slave to his lamprey eels as punishment for breaking a crystal goblet while Pollio was entertaining Augustus. Disturbed by the brutality of Pollio’s actions, Augustus intervened to save the man’s life by breaking every crystal goblet in the house (Cassius Dio, Roman History 54.23.1–6).
One problem with Jefferson’s argument is that he presents a meager few examples of cruelty by Romans toward those they enslaved as broadly representative. For instance, he presents Cato’s practice of selling off elderly slaves in Cato’s farming manual De Agri Cultura as indicative of widespread cruelty of a variety unknown in his American context. Jefferson’s willful denial of the extreme inhumanity of how enslaved African Americans were bought and sold is exasperating. His remarks on Cato also strike me as odd, given that Jefferson was familiar with Plutarch’s Life of Cato, which he cited on the previous page of Notes as evidence for Cato’s treatment of his slaves. Presumably Jefferson was aware that Plutarch criticized Cato for the cruelty of this precise practice. Plutarch presents Cato’s sale of elderly slaves as both non-normative and inhumane (Plut. Cato 5.1–2). In other words, Jefferson had evidence available to him that testified to a poor reception of Cato’s actions at a later date by at least one critic. Yet his apparent desire to present an uncomplicated polarity in which contemporary slavery is benevolent, while Roman slavery is inhumane, seems to explain why he ignores any debate or disagreement in antiquity about how the enslaved should be treated.
Jefferson doesn’t mention his source on Vedius Pollio, nor does he tell the full story. Dio tells this anecdote about Augustus and Pollio as part of Pollio’s obituary to illustrate his vicious character: “This is the sort of person Pollio was,” Dio concludes. According to Dio, Augustus refused to fulfill Pollio’s bequest of an exceptionally beautiful public work to be constructed from his estate, and instead had Pollio’s house demolished so that he would have no monument (μνημόσυνον) in the city. Augustus, like many Greeks and Romans, understood the power of images in public spaces. He knew that it could be a problem to have monuments to this sort of man in your city.
Like later apologists for American slavery who would attempt to rewrite the history of the Antebellum South, Jefferson denies the institution’s profound cruelty, as if slavery is somehow morally justifiable so long as enslavers are nice to those they enslave. He has also twisted his ancient sources: in the cases of Cato and Pollio, he has obscured the fact that their actions are presented in the sources as non-normative. This doesn’t mean that cruelty to enslaved people wasn’t widespread in the Roman world, only that Plutarch presents Cato, and Dio presents Pollio, as exceptions rather than the rule.
The problems with Jefferson’s interpretation of his ancient sources mount as he asserts that Roman slaves “were often their rarest artists,” and excelled in “science.” Says Jefferson, “Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus were slaves. But they were of the race of whites.” Yes, Jefferson claims that Terence was white. But Terence’s full Latin name was Publius Terentius Afer; the cognomen Afer suggests that either Terence or his family had come to Italy from Africa. While this doesn’t actually tell us anything about Terence’s “race,” or even about his skin color, it’s enough to conclude that anyone who reads “afer” and thinks “white guy” clearly has an agenda.
Terence’s skin color aside, it is a serious anachronism to consider the Romans (or the Greeks) “white” at all, as the racial category of “white” is a relatively recent invention. We can glimpse this construction of whiteness in Jefferson’s words: “white” defines those ancient people whose contributions he wants to claim. This definition of race is not grounded in skin color or other phenotypical traits, but in Jefferson’s belief in these individuals’ superior artistic and intellectual capabilities: for Jefferson, full humanity, including the capacity for genius, belongs to white men alone. Because he owned many enslaved African-Americans, and even enslaved the majority of his own children, it’s not merely a matter of words that he denies full humanity to everyone he deems not white. This is the sort of person Jefferson was.
While Notes is in part a work of scholarship, it was also composed as an act of statesmanship. The use of Greek and Roman antiquity in Query XIV, though in some respects unrepresentative of Jefferson’s reception of classical learning, serves as an alarming example of one use he saw in studying Greek and Latin authors, and is consistent with the broader pattern of racism he displayed throughout his life. As I said, Greek and Roman antiquity functioned as a sign system for elite white male power. This was true before and after Jefferson’s day, in both Europe and European colonies like Virginia. Through the Rockfish Gap Report, we see, in part, how this tradition was planted in Charlottesville. In Notes, we see how deeply ingrained it already was in UVA’s leading man. And on the night of August 11, we heard its echo.
The torch-wielding white supremacists who descended on UVA chose their symbolism with care: they of course intended to evoke the Klan (and Nazi Germany), as well as to recall their torchlit May 2017 gathering in a downtown Charlottesville park, which was held in response to the city’s efforts to remove two statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson erected during the Jim Crow era on city property — also the stated reason for the August rally.
Other pictures of the torch rally at UVA make it apparent that the final destination of the procession was a statue of Jefferson that stands in front of the Rotunda, around which a small band of counter-protesters assembled and were eventually assaulted. By making the Jefferson statue the focal point of their march, they inserted Jefferson into a sort of trinity with Jackson and Lee: three white supremacists around whom they could rally, burn torches, and impose their will. Query XIV of Notes makes it easy to see why white supremacists identify Jefferson as one of their own.
In the central open space of the Academical Village, another statue of Jefferson frequently receives votive offerings. I’ve often spotted roses or cans of Pepsi at his feet, or a UVA pom-pom in his hand. Benign gestures of university pride, perhaps. But when we consider the deference bordering on reverence that he receives from administrators and students alike (though neither universally nor necessarily without nuance), we could also say that Jefferson is virtually our local Greek hero. His images, and narratives of who he was, hold considerable power here. UVA alumni Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler seem to have understood this quite well, and to have recognized the power of claiming him as one of their own. UVA is one of many universities grappling with problematic images and legacies on their campuses; the torchlight of August 11 and the ensuing trauma reveal how high the stakes can be when you maintain monuments to this sort of man on your campus.
When fall classes began a little over a week after the rallies, I was impressed by how many of my students, all of whom had chosen to enroll at UVA before Charlottesville became a hashtag, expressed a firm sense of agency in the aftermath of terror. But there was also a good deal of naiveté, even denial, in the oft-repeated refrain that the events of August 11–12 do not represent “who we are” at UVA or in Charlottesville. This sentiment remains widespread among Charlottesville’s white self-described progressives. At UVA, the ubiquitous images of Jefferson looking down on us from his pedestal suggest that what happened actually is part of who we are, and the Rockfish Gap Report indicates that the university’s founders had a vision of who it was for that overlaps significantly with the worldview of the Spencers and Kesslers. The question is rather what sort of people we are to become in light of what happened.
There is a parallel between my students’ responses to August 11–12 and the current debates in our field about its historical and current role in white supremacy. I expect that I am not the only white classicist who has had the experience of realizing only gradually that we are members of a field that has been complicit in horrors. We never wanted or intended to be party to anything resembling what Jefferson did in Notes, and our growing understanding of our field’s past is met by our own rising horror.
We may feel inclined to believe that what people like Jefferson used Greek and Roman antiquity to accomplish does not represent who we are, because we do not see ourselves as complicit in racism. But there can be no room for naiveté, self-deception, or wishful thinking. This is not merely matter of the distant past. It’s not only in Charlottesville that these realities are painfully present; they are also present within the ivory tower. Our response to this reality determines what sort of people we classicists are — especially for those of us who are white.
White classicists like myself must recognize that it is our default setting to embody the whole of the legacy of our field, including the legacies of our particular institutions. We are not absolved of our responsibility for addressing these legacies, even if we didn’t choose this embodiment any more than the citizens of Charlottesville chose to be terrorized last August. But the long history of racism in Charlottesville that has continued unbroken from before Jefferson’s day, and remains largely unacknowledged by the city’s majority white population, made Charlottesville a space for these events. Unacknowledged legacies contain this kind of danger.
There is one sort of justice that involves telling the truth about what happened in the past, particularly when that truth is painful. There is another that involves working to rectify the current injustices that have resulted from this past, and new ones that arise. This is as true in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity as it is in every arena that is sustained, infiltrated, or in any way touched by white supremacy. It is morally incumbent upon us to be the sort of people who employ our best creative efforts in pursuit of both.
Sarah Teets is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Her research interests are in how identities are formed and performed in Greek prose, especially Josephus.
The author would like to thank Jennifer LaFleur, Hunter Teets, Janet Spittler, and Roberto Armengol for their help.
