Positive reconstruction · reader-scoped, not an inferred-absence lacuna
This reconstruction covers the readable fraction of Thomas Jefferson's formation -- attested reading and writing only, not the whole of a life.
Thomas Jefferson and Homer (in the original Greek)
Thomas Jefferson's attested relationship to Homer (in the original Greek).
Thomas Jefferson is attested as having read this work by Homer.
Evidence ledger
- First-person reading testimony (First-person comparative reading claim on Homer in the original: 'I enjoy Homer in his own language infinitely beyond Pope's translation of him.' The catalogue's only Homer entry is Blackwell's Life and Writings of Homer (a book about Homer), so Homer's own text is proposed as a new Work.). Self-report reliability discount 0.85: Habitual, comparative and specific ('I enjoy Homer in his own language infinitely beyond Pope's translation of him, & both beyond the dull narrative of the same events by Dares Phrygius') - a three-way ranking that presupposes reading all three; slight discount for the rhetorical luxuriance of the sublime-luxury frame. Pope's translation and Dares Phrygius are co-attested in the same sentence but lost to the one-Work-per-record schema (recorded here).