A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country/Cornelia
CORNELIA,
Of the family of the Scipios, and mother of the Gracchi, so excelled in knowledge and the study of the sciences, that she was generally praised by the most learned men, for her probity, wisdom, and philosophy, lectures on for which she read publicly in Rome. Quintilian says, "We are much bound to the mother Cornelia for the eloquence of the Gracchi, whose unparalleled learning, in her excellent epistles, she hath bequeathed to posterity." Cicero says, in his Rhetoric, "That if the name of woman had not distinguished Cornelia, she had deserved the first place among philosophers; because he never saw such grave sentences proceed from any mortal creature as were contained in her writings."
A statue was erected on her sepulchre, with this inscription:—"Here lieth interred the most learned Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi: she was both happy and fortunate in her disciples, whom she instructed, though unhappy in her children."