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Still another, and a not unimportant indication of progress, which, if you will, you may add to the foregoing, is this: a man no longer holds the opinion that any one of his sins is unimportant, but is studiously circumspect and heedful regarding all. For just as those who have given up the hope of ever being rich make nothing of their small expenditures, with the idea that whatever is added to a little will make nothing great, The reference is to Hesiod, Works and Days, 361 (cf. 9 E). whereas Hope as it draws nearer to its goal joins hands with wealth in increasing the desire for wealth, so it is with the activities which bear upon virtue: the man who does not acquiesce much in the sentiments What difference does this make ? and This way now; better next time, but who gives heed to each separate thing, and is impatient and vexed if vice ever finds its way into the most insignificant of his errors and suggests a reason for condoning it—this man already shows plainly that he is winning for himself a spotless treasure and that he scorns to sully himself in any way whatever. On the other hand, to imagine that nothing can cause any great disgrace, or can even be of any great importance, makes men easy-going and careless about little things. True enough, it makes no difference, when men are building some rough wall which is to have a coping, whether they throw into the foundation a chance piece of timber or a stone picked up from the ground, or whether they put into the lower courses a fallen slab from some tomb, the same sort of thing that moral slovens do when they bring together promiscuously and accumulate actions and conduct of every kind; but those who are making progress, of whose life already, as of some holy temple or regal palace, The golden foundation hath been wrought,Pindar, Frag. 205 in Christ’s ed. do not indiscriminately accept for it a single action, but, using reason to guide them, they bring each one into place and fit it where it belongs. And we may well conceive that Polycleitus had this in mind when he said that the task is hardest for those whose clay has reached the stage when they must use the finger-nail.Plutarch again refers to this dictum in Moralia, 636 C. It is quite clear from the two passages that Plutarch refers Polycleitus’s saying to modelling in clay, amd so, too, it is possible to interpret Horace, Sat. i. 5. 32 (ad unguem factus homo), and Ars Poet. 294 (castigavit ad unguem), but in Persius, Sat. i. 65, the plural (ungues) is used in describing the testing of the fineness of the joint in marble by drawing the nails over it. Cf. the note on ἐξ ὀνύ, supra, 3 C.
