generally speaking, Jefferson “was more partial to the Greek than the Roman literature; and among the Greeks, the Athenians were, in all respects, his chosen people.”4 In his tastes and cast of mind, Jefferson was ahead of his time. Both these inclinations, toward ancient Greece and especially its Athenians, were a departure from the eighteenth-century norm, but would become fashionable in the nineteenth. This preference for the Greeks may have inoculated Jefferson against the stiff, Roman-like Federalism of Adams and Washington.
