Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia

Glossary

• accompts accounts
• Aesculapius the Greek and Roman god of medicine
• amor patriae Latin for “love of country”
• attainder a bill passed by a legislature making something a crime, thus creating criminals without benefit of a trial
• Augustan age the period in Roman history when Caesar Augustus was the first emperor
• bills of exchange negotiable instruments acknowledging debts
• catholic here, universal
• Cato Marcus Porcius Cato, known as Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman, warrior, and writer, author of De re rustica (On Agriculture)
• Chancery a court that deals with such matters as real estate and inheritance (rather than criminal law)
• corruption of blood the incapacity to inherit because of a bill of attainder
• descent and dower legal terms referring to the inheritance of property, either by descent (property passes to natural heirs) or dower (property passes to a wife as part of a deceased husband's estate)
• Dunciad an eighteenth-century satirical poem by the British poet Alexander Pope
• Emperor Claudius Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, the fourth Roman emperor
• entailable able to be entailed; reference to property that passes to heirs “in tail,” meaning that heirs use it and control it but cannot sell it, for it passes to subsequent heirs
• Epictetus a Stoic philosopher in ancient Greece
• estrum a state of sexual excitability
• Euclid an ancient Greek mathematician, the “Father of Geometry”
• Ignatius Sancho an eighteenth-century British composer, actor, and writer and the first known black to vote in a British election
• Jove fix'd it certain … from Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Odyssey, book 17, lines 392–393
• Oranootan orangutan
• Phaedrus an ancient Roman writer of fables
• Phyllis Whately Phillis Wheatley, an eighteenth-century slave poet
• reticular membrane a thin layer of tissue that covers a surface, lines a cavity, or divides a space or organ
• scarf-skin the outermost layer of skin
• scire facias a Latin term referring to a court command to a borrower to show up at a hearing and show cause why a foreclosure should not be authorized
• Shandean a reference to Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy (1759–1769), famous for its extravagant language and stylistic peculiarities
• shewn an antique form of “shown”
• stile an antique form of “style”
• Terence Publius Terentius Afer, a playwright in the ancient Roman Republic
• Tyber the Tiber River, which runs through Rome; the Tiber Island is associated with healing and the god of medicine, Aesculapius
• undertakers people who have a statutory right to execute roadworks
• Vedius Pollio Publius Vedius Pollio, a Roman equestrian and friend of Augustus, known for his cruelty to slaves
• “Vendat boves vetulos …” The precise quote, from Cato's De re rustica, is “Vendat … boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat” or, in English, “Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is not required.”