But there was a sound core in this morality. Clan virtues were firmly inwrought in character. The virtue of loyalty to comrades was strong; the ethical qualities of courage and self-devotion for the common good, and of hospitality to strangers were well developed; and the domestic virtues of chastity and constancy in woman are portrayed in such a way as to show that, if not common, they were at least held in high esteem and reverence. [Sidenote: Reprobation by the philosophers and later poets of the Homeric tales of the gods] From the Homeric Age onward there was a progressive purification of the moral feelings. One evidence of this ethical progress is found in the repudiation by the later moral consciousness of the primitive myths of the gods. These tales, as we have just noted, were coarse, sensual, and immoral. The philosophers of the sixth and following centuries, and the poets of this later time, denounced these stories as unworthy and unethical conceptions of deity. Pythagoras is said, upon his return from Hades, to have reported seeing there the souls of Homer and Hesiod undergoing punishment for what they had said of the gods. Pindar purges the tales of their grosser immoral elements. Others sought to relieve the poets of the charge of impiety by reading the myths as allegories. The Sophists and Stoics moralized them, giving them an ethical aim and purpose.[467] Plato, in reprobating what Hesiod says of Uranus, declared it “the greatest of all lies in high places.” He would strike out from the poets all passages in which they told these lies about the gods and heroes, before allowing the boys and men to read them.[468] In the hands of the later Attic tragedians the whole traditionary religious mythology was spiritualized and given a deeper ethical content and meaning. This purifying of the Greek moral consciousness finds an exact parallel in what is taking place in the modern Christian world respecting the conceptions of deity found in the early chronicles of the Hebrew Bible and transmitted as a religious bequest to the European peoples. These ideas of God are rejected by the truer moral consciousness of to-day as the crude notions of a gross and morally immature age. Just as this modern rejection of these unworthy primitive conceptions of the divine character register our own moral advance, so does the rejection, by the later Greek thinkers and teachers, of the Homeric and Hesiodic conceptions of the gods register the advance in ethical thought in Greece during the interval that separates the era of these poets from the Solonian and Platonic Ages. [Sidenote: Ethical significance of the transition from the continuance to the retribution theory]