So, with regard to the great natures in writing, where greatness no longer falls outside use and benefit, we should at once observe that, though such men are far from being faultless, they are all above the merely mortal. The other excellences prove that those who use them are men; sublimity raises us close to the great-mindedness of God; faultlessness escapes blame, but the great is also wondered at. §1
What more is needed, after this, to say that each one of those men purchases all his slips by a single sublimity and success? And, most decisive of all, that if one were to pick out and gather into one heap all the slips of Homer, of Demosthenes, of Plato, and of the other very greatest writers, they would be found a very small thing, indeed not even the smallest fraction, of the things in which those heroes everywhere succeed? Therefore the whole of time and life, unable to be convicted of madness by envy, has carried in their prizes and keeps them, and seems likely to keep them safe ‘so long as water flows and tall trees flourish.’ §2
To him who writes that the faulty Colossus is no better than the Doryphoros of Polyclitus, one may answer this among many things: in art, the highest precision is what is admired; in works of nature, magnitude; man is by nature endowed with reason. In statues we look for the human likeness, but in language for what passes beyond, as I said, the human. §3
Yet (the exhortation comes back upon the beginning of our memorandum), since faultlessness is in most cases the achievement of art, and pre-eminence (though not always at the same pitch) the achievement of greatness of nature, in every way to use art as the auxiliary of nature is fitting; for the interweaving of these two would, perhaps, complete perfection. So much was needful to say in passing judgement upon the questions before us. Let each take his pleasure in what he likes. §4