of licence in the handling of mythology had always been allowed to poets, even in the days when the faith of Greeks in their traditions was most childlike and unquestioning. Homer and Hesiod do not always agree in their accounts of the same transaction. When Pindar refuses[1] to tell the story of Bellerophon's sad fate—his final fall from the winged steed Pegasus—he does not attempt to enlist his Corinthian hearers on the side of scepticism by an outspoken condemnation of the legend which bore so hard upon their favourite local hero. He simply leaves it untold, and passes to a more pleasing topic—the reception of the winged steed in the stalls of Zeus. But, when he tells the same legend to a Theban audience,[2] in whom the fate of the Corinthian hero would excite no special feeling of regret or wounded pride, he no longer shrinks from describing and justifying the catastrophe.
"So the winged steed the audacious horseman threw,
Who hoped the brazen halls of Zeus to view,
Impious Bellerophon! a bitter end,
When man unholy joys hath seized,
Be sure, offended Heaven will send."—(S.)
A poet with Pindar's lofty views as to the nature of divine beings, and his genuine enthusiasm for morality as he conceived it, could not but be struck from time to time with the inconsistencies and ethical shortcomings of his legendary materials, the unseemly acts and attributes ascribed to heroes and even to gods. Yet it is but seldom that he breaks out into open revolt. He omits, he deplores, he palliates, he justifies, he moralises, but
