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."

"What you say," replied Publius, "sounds convincing, but it is still not
perfectly clear to me; no doubt because I learned at an early age to
prefe