Come, then, let us take some really pure and unblameable writer. Is it not worth raising the general question whether the better thing in poetry and prose is greatness in some flawed pieces, or moderation in successful ones, perfectly sound and never falling? And further, by Zeus, do the more numerous virtues or the greater rightly carry off the prize in writing? These are matters proper to a study of sublimity, and call always for verdict. §1
I am aware that natures of utmost magnitude are least pure: precision in everything is in danger of being petty, and in greatness, as in immense fortunes, there must be something also overlooked. May it not even be necessary that the lowly and middling natures should, by never venturing or aiming at the heights, remain on the whole faultless and the safer, while greatnesses become precarious by their very magnitude? §2
Nor am I ignorant of this second point: that by nature all things human are recognised more from their worse side, and that the memory of faults remains ineradicable, while that of beauties soon flows away. §3
Although I have set forth not a few faults of Homer and the other very great writers, and am least pleased with their stumbles, yet I prefer to call them not voluntary errors but oversights, occasional and as it happened, slipped in at random by greatness of nature without minding. None the less I think the greater virtues, even if they do not run level in everything, always carry the vote for primacy, if for nothing else, then for the greatness of mind itself. Apollonius, no doubt, never falls in his Argonautica, and Theocritus, save in a few outside places, is most successful in his Bucolics; would you, however, prefer to be Apollonius rather than Homer? §4
What of this? Is Eratosthenes in his Erigone, faultless throughout the little poem, a greater poet than Archilochus, who hurries along much that is unmanaged, and that outburst of divine breath which can hardly be brought under any rule? Or in lyric, would you choose to be Bacchylides rather than Pindar; in tragedy, Ion of Chios, by Zeus, rather than Sophocles? The former two are unfailing and polished and beautified throughout in elegant style; but Pindar and Sophocles set everything ablaze at times by their rush, only to go out unaccountably and fall most unhappily. No man in his senses would, by setting all the works of Ion in a row, weigh them against the single drama of Oedipus. §5