XLI. We have hitherto treated of political prudence only, in the discussion of which point, we have contented ourselves with a few examples, and have omitted the many. It is needless to insist on the ability of women in point of œconomical prudence, as every day’s experience exhibits to us, houses and families extremely well governed by women, and very badly governed by men. XLII. We shall next proceed to consider resolution as a property, which the men look upon as peculiarly annexed to, or inseparable from, their own sex. I admit that heaven has endowed them in comparison to the women, with a quadruple portion of this ingredient; but not that it was given them as an exempt property, peculiarly annexed to, and belonging to their sex only, and that the other was to be excluded from the least participation of it. XLIII. Not an age has passed, which has not been ennobled and graced by women of eminence and worth; and without dwelling on the heroines of Scripture, and the martyrs to the law of grace, because actions, which are aided by the especial intervention of a supernatural hand, should be attributed to the divine power, and not to any natural virtue, or faculty of a sex: I say, without having recourse to these sort of examples, women of heroic valour, present themselves to the memory in crouds; and after the Semiramis’s, the Artamissas, the Thomyris, the Zenobias, there appears an Aretaphila, the wife of Nicrotatus, the sovereign of Cyrene in Libya, in whose incomparably generous nature, the greatest fortitude of mind, the most tender love of her country, and the most subtile and discerning understanding, contended for the pre-eminence; because, to deliver her country from the violent tyranny of her husband, and to revenge the murder, which, for the sake of possessing her he had perpetrated on her first consort, she made herself the leader of a conspiracy, and deprived Nicrotatus of the kingdom and his life. Leander, who inherited all his brother’s cruelty, having succeeded to the crown, she had the valour and address to rid the world of this second tyrant also; crowning in the end, all her heroic actions, by declining to accept the diadem, which from a grateful sense of the many benefits she had conferred on them, was offered to her by the Cyreneans. Denepetina, the daughter of the great Mithridates, and the inseparable companion and partner of her father, in all his dangerous undertakings and projects, in the execution of which she manifested upon every occasion, that strength of mind and body, which the singular circumstance of her coming into the world with double rows of teeth, seems to have foretold at her birth; after her father was defeated by the great Pompey, she was shut up and besieged in a castle by Manlius Priscus, where, finding it impossible to defend herself, she deprived herself of life, to avoid suffering the ignominy of being made a slave. An Arria, the wife of Cecinus Peto, whose