'With every language you learn,' he had said, 'you will gain a nation.' But there were many peoples in her father's kingdom, and when she was Queen they must all love her.

True, she began with the tongue of the conquerors, not the conquered.

So it happened that we first learned Lucretius, who reproduces in verse the doctrines of Epicurus.

My father was our teacher, and the second year she read Lucretius as if it were a Greek book.

She had only half known Egyptian; now she speedily acquired it.