And it is more with him than a mere manner in poetical style.  The same defect which we feel more or less present in all poets of antiquity—­least of all perhaps in Virgil and Sophokles, but even in them somewhat—­a certain want of widely sympathetic tenderness, this is unquestionably present in Pindar.  What of this quality may have found expression in his lost poems, especially the Dirges, we can scarcely guess, but in his triumphal odes it hardly appears at all, unless in the touches of tender gracefulness into which he softens when speaking of the young.  And we find this want in him mainly because objects of pity, such as especially elicit that quality of tenderness, are never or seldom present to Pindar’s mind.  He sees evil only in the shape of some moral baseness, falsehood, envy, arrogance, and the like, to be scathed in passing by the good man’s scorn, or else in the shape of a dark mystery of pain, to be endured by those on whom it causelessly falls in a proud though undefiant silence.  It was not for him, as for the great tragedians, to ’purge the mind by pity and fear,’ for those passions had scarcely a place in his own mind or in the minds of those of whom he in his high phantasy would fain have had the world consist.  And as in this point somewhat, so still more in others, does Pindar remind us, even more than might have been expected in a contemporary, of Aeschylus.  The latter by virtue of his Athenian nurture as well as of his own greater natural gifts reveals to us a greater number of thoughts, and those more advanced and more interesting than we find in Pindar, but the similarity in moral temper and tone is very striking, as also is the way in which we see this temper acting on their beliefs.  Both hold strongly, as is the wont of powerful minds in an age of stability as opposed to an age of transition, to the traditions and beliefs on which the society around them rests, but both modify these traditions and beliefs according to the light which arises in them, and which is as much moral as intellectual light.  In so doing they are indeed in harmony with the best instincts of the society around them, but they lead and guide such instincts and give them shape and definiteness.  In the Oresteaen trilogy of Aeschylus we have an ever-memorable assertion of the supreme claims of human morality to human allegiance, of the eternal truth that humanity can know no object of reverence and worship except itself idealised, its own virtues victorious over its own vices, and existing in the greatest perfection which it can at any given time conceive.  Somewhat the same lesson as that of the Oresteia is taught later, with more of sweetness and harmony, but not with more force, in the Oedipus Coloneus of Sophokles.  And in Pindar we see the same tendencies inchoate.  Like Aeschylus he does by implication subordinate to morality both politics and religion.  He ignores or flatly denies tales that bring discredit on the gods; he will only bow down to them when they have