“Almost everything that men have said for the best has been said in Greek.
Everything that any of us can attempt to harm our fellows or to benefit them has already been done by a Greek.
The same is true of our inner choices: from cynicism to idealism, from Pyrrhonian scepticism to the sacred dreams of Pythagoras, our refusals, our consensuses, we only repeat them; our vices, our virtues have Greek models.
The empire, I governed it in Latin; in Latin will be engraved my epitaph, on the walls of the mausoleum on the banks of the Tiber; but in Greek I thought, in Greek I lived.”
(“The Memoirs of Hadrian” Marguerite Yourcenar)