Consonant with these higher views of divinity is Pindar’s treatment of the myths. The grosser elements he leaves aside as being unworthy of the gods. At times he openly protests, as for example in the first Olympian Ode where he declares that he will not treat the story of Pelops in the traditional way, which made Tantalus offer his son’s flesh at a dinner given the immortals: “I will speak differently from those who have gone before. I may not call any one of the blessed gods a cannibal.”[121] This revolt against the current forms of myths was due in part to his belief in the moral perfection of divinity, in part to his moral sense concerning man. His rule was, as laid down by himself, that man should say only good things of the gods, and he shrank from attributing to the divinities things which it would be base for men to do. So in his fifth Nemean Ode he was unwilling to tell of the fratricide of the heroes Peleus and Telamon, but broke off his narrative abruptly, just as he rejected with indignation the shameful tales told of Tantalus. Furthermore Pindar subjected the myths and religious beliefs with which he had to deal to the test of reason; among the several versions which he found current he recognized that some must be false, and so he endeavored to separate the good from the evil, to control the traditions of his people, and thus to practise a free criticism in his work. On the nature of sin Pindar, as the Greeks in general, holds that whenever man passes the bounds appointed between a mortal and a god, or between man and his fellowmen, he becomes thereby a sinner. Excess is the form of sin which he makes repeatedly his theme. When he praises Lampon of Aegina for “pursuing the mean with his thought and maintaining it in his acts,”[122] he is recalling the principle laid down in Hesiod’s verse, which had passed long since into a proverb: “Keep a middle course; the seasonable in all things is best.”[123]