“And what is great—­and what is small?” asked Aristarchus.  “Very opposite opinions on that subject may be equally true, since it depends solely on us and our feelings how things appear to us—­whether cold or warm; lovely or repulsive—­and when Protagoras says that ’man is the measure of all things,’ that is the most acceptable of all the maxims of the Sophists; moreover the smallest matter—­as you will fully appreciate —­acquires an importance all the greater in proportion as the thing is perfect, of which it forms a part.  If you slit the ear of a cart-horse, what does it signify? but suppose the same thing were to happen to a thoroughbred horse, a charger that you ride on to battle!

“A wrinkle or a tooth more or less in the face of a peasant woman matters little, or not at all, but it is quite different in a celebrated beauty.  If you scrawl all over the face with which the coarse finger of the potter has decorated a water-jar, the injury to the wretched pot is but small, but if you scratch, only with a needle’s point, that gem with the portraits of Ptolemy and Arsinoe, which clasps Cleopatra’s robe round her fair throat, the richest queen will grieve as though she had suffered some serious loss.

“Now, what is there more perfect or more worthy to be treasured than the noblest works of great thinkers and great poets.

“To preserve them from injury, to purge them from the errors which, in the course of time, may have spotted their immaculate purity, this is our task; and if we do indeed raise blocks of stone it is not to weight a sparrow’s feather that it may not be blown away, but to seal the door which guards a precious possession, and to preserve a gem from injury.

“The chatter of girls at a fountain is worth nothing but to be wafted away on the winds, and to be remembered by none; but can a son ever deem that one single word is unimportant which his dying father has bequeathed to him as a clue to his path in life?  If you yourself were such a son, and your ear had not perfectly caught the parting counsels of the dying-how many talents of silver would you not pay to be able to supply the missing words?  And what are immortal works of the great poets and thinkers but such sacred words of warning addressed, not to a single individual, but to all that are not barbarians, however many they maybe.  They will elevate, instruct, and delight our descendants a thousand years hence as they do us at this day, and they, if they are not degenerate and ungrateful will be thankful to those who have devoted the best powers of their life to completing and restoring all that our mighty forefathers have said, as it must have originally stood before it was mutilated, and spoiled by carelessness and folly.

“He who, like King Euergetes, puts one syllable in Homer right, in place of a wrong one, in my opinion has done a service to succeeding generations—­aye and a great service.”