at
what they have no hope of succeeding in. But it is good for all men to
try everything, who have ever desired to attain any objects which are
of importance and greatly to be desired. But if there be any one who
feels that he is deficient either in natural power, or in any eminent
force of natural genius, or that he is but inadequately instructed in
the knowledge of important sciences, still let him hold on his course
as far as he can. For if a man aims at the highest place, it is very
honourable to arrive at the second or even the third rank. For in
the poets there is room not only for Homer (to confine myself to the
Greeks), or for Archilochus, or Sophocles, or Pindar, but there is
room also for those who are second to them, or even below the second.
Nor, indeed, did the nobleness of Plato in philosophical studies deter
Aristotle from writing; nor did Aristotle himself, by his admirable
knowledge and eloquence, extinguish the zeal in those pursuits of all
other men.

II. And it is not only the case that eminent men have not been
deterred by such circumstances from the highest class of studies, but
even those artists have not renounced their art who have been unable
to equal the beauty of the Talysus[58] which we have seen at Rhodes,
or of the Coan Venus. Nor have subsequent sculptors been so far
alarmed at the statue of the Olympian Jove, or of the Shield-bearer,
as to give up trying what they could accomplish, or how far they could
advance; and, indeed, there has been so vast a multitude of those men,
and each of them has obtained so much credit in his own particular
walk, that, while we admire the most perfect models, we have also
approbation to spare for those who come short of them.

But in the case of orators--I mean Greek orators--it is a marvellous
thing how far one is superior to all the rest. And yet when
Demosthenes flourished there were many illustrious orators, and so
there were before his time, and the supply has not failed since. So
that there is no reason why the hopes of those men, who have devoted
themselves to the study of eloquence, should be broken, or why
their industry should languish. For even the very highest pitch of
excellency ought not to be despaired of; and in perfect things those
things are very good which are next to the most perfect.

And I, in depicting a consummate orator, will draw a picture of such
an one as perhaps never existed. For I am not asking who he was, but
what that