XXXV. There have been a thousand examples of princesses, who were expert and able politicians. No age will ever forget the first woman, whose true character history developed and rescued from the obscurity of fable: I mean Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, who in her infancy was nursed by doves, but afterwards soared superior to the eagles: she not only knew how to make herself blindly obeyed by the subjects her husband had left her, but she also made subjects of all the neighbouring nations, and by extending her conquests, she likewise made neighbours of the most distant ones. Her empire extended on one side to Ethiopia, and on the other to India. Nor can Artemisia, queen of Caria, be forgotten, who not only maintained, during her long widowhood, the respect and adoration of that kingdom; but, being invaded by the Rhodians, she, in her own territories, by two singular stratagems, with two attacks only destroyed the troops of her enemies; and, passing suddenly from the defensive to the offensive, she invaded them in her turn, and conquered and triumphed over the island of Rhodes. The two Aspasias also will be ever remembered, to whose admirable management, Pericles the husband of one of them, and Cyrus the son of Darius Notho, gallant of the other, happily and successfully, confided the government of their states; as will likewise the most prudent Phile, daughter of Antipater, whom, while she was a child, her father advised with concerning the government of the kingdom of Macedonia, and who afterwards, by her wise stratagems and great address, extricated her husband, the precipitate and flighty Demetrius, from a thousand difficulties. Livia, of fertile invention, whose subtile cunning seems to have been too deep for the penetration of Augustus, is another instance of female ability, for she could never have had such dominion over his mind, if he had known her. The sagacious Agrippina is likewise another, although her arts, as she unhappily employed them in promoting her son Nero to the throne, were fatal to herself and the world. Amalethunsa also, is well deserving of being reckoned among the women of great talents, in whom, her understanding all the languages of every nation subject to the Roman empire, was esteemed an inferior accomplishment, compared to the great skill and address, which she displayed in governing the state during the minority of her son Athalaricus.