“Yet this child, whom my father once compared to a thinking flower, bore without complaint her sad destiny—­her father’s banishment, her mother’s death, her sister Berenike’s profligacy.  Even to me, in whom she found a second brother and fully trusted, she spoke of these sorrowful things only in guarded allusions.  I know that she understood what was passing fully and perfectly, and how deeply she felt it; but pain placed itself between her and the ‘chief good,’ and she mastered it.  And when she sat at work, with what tenacious power the delicate creature struggled until she had conquered the hardest task and outstripped Charmian and even me!

“In those days I understood why, among the gods, a maiden rules over learning, and why she is armed with the weapons of war.  You have heard how many languages Cleopatra speaks.  A remark of Timagenes had fallen into her soul like a seed.  ‘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.  During our stay at Philae she found a troglodyte who was induced to teach her his language.  There were Jews enough here in Alexandria to instruct her in theirs, and she also learned its kindred tongue, Arabic.

“When, many years later, she visited Antony at Tarsus, the warriors imagined that some piece of Egyptian magic was at work, for she addressed each commander in his own tongue, and talked with him as if she were a native of the same country.

“It was the same with everything.  She outstripped us in every branch of study.  To her burning ambition it would have been unbearable to lag behind.

“The Roman Lucretius became her favourite poet, although she was no more friendly to his nation than I, but the self-conscious power of the foe pleased her, and once I heard her exclaim ’Ah! if the Egyptians were Romans, I would give up our garden for Berenike’s throne.’

“Lucretius constantly led her back to Epicurus, and awakened a severe conflict in her unresting mind.  You probably know that he teaches that life in itself is not so great a blessing that it must be deemed a misfortune not to live.  It is only spoiled by having death appear to us as the greatest of misfortunes.  Only the soul which ceases to regard death as a misfortune finds peace.  Whoever knows that thought and feeling end with life will not fear death; for, no matter how many dear and precious things the dead have left here below, their yearning for them has ceased with life.  He declares that providing for the body is the greatest folly, while the Egyptian religion, in which Anubis strove to strengthen her faith, maintained precisely the opposite.