Greco-Roman Literature and Culture in the Imagination of Virginia’s Tidewater Region, 1607–1826

The Empire of the Mind

Benjamin Stephen Haller

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781793643285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: Literature

This book explores the influence of classical texts upon early European settlers and inhabitants of the Tidewater region of Virginia, addressing how Greek and Roman literature and culture shaped and sometimes challenged prevailing assumptions about personhood, liberty, town planning, and representative government in Virginia during the period of its expansion from the fort at Jamestown to Thomas Jefferson's Virginia. Ben Haller introduces the reader to the Ovid translation which George Sandys penned during his time in Virginia as Treasurer; William Strachey's account of the wreck of the Sea Venture, likely one inspiration for William Shakespeare's The Tempest; William Byrd II's writings, including his secret diaries which record the intimate details of the life of an Indian Trader and plantation owner in the early eighteenth century; and Jefferson's expansive Enlightenment Era appetite for knowledge classical and modern. Haller's analysis of these texts is carefully anchored in a discussion of the cultural historical context of the English settlement of Virginia, the excavations of Pompeii, the eighteenth-century mania for Palladian architecture, the construction of the campus of the University of Virginia, and new Enlightenment ideals of personal liberty and human rights which came to the fore during Jefferson's lifetime, and which he helped to enshrine in modern American political thought.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Apoikia: Voyages of Exploration Greek, Roman, and English
• Chapter 2: Questions of Origins: Ovid, Shakespeare, and the Origins of the Peoples of the New World
• Chapter 3: George Sandys: Relation of a Voyage begun Ann. Dom. 1610 and Sandys in Virginia
• Chapter 4: O Cyclops, Cyclops! George Sandys’s Representations of Ethnic Alterity in the Cyclops Episodes of Metamorphoses 13 and
• Chapter 5: Empire’s Entropy and the Empire of the Mind: William Strachey’s Horace 3.27 and his History of Travaile into Virginia Britannia
• Chapter 6: The Arcadia of William Byrd II’s Westover Plantation
• Chapter 7: A Promissory Note: Thomas Jefferson’s Architectural and Constitutional Ideals
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• About the Author