[82] In the pictures of the Homeric Heroes, there is no material difference of character recognized between one race of Greeks and another,—or even between Greeks and Trojans. See Helbig, Die Sittlichen Zustände des Griechischen Heldenalters, part ii. p. 53. While, therefore, we renounce the idea of chronologizing or historicizing the events of Grecian legend, we may turn them to profit as valuable memorials of that state of society, feeling, and intelligence, which must be to us the starting-point of the history of the people. Of course, the legendary age, like all those which succeeded it, had its antecedent causes and determining conditions; but of these we know nothing, and we are compelled to assume it as a primary fact, for the purpose of following out its subsequent changes. To conceive absolute beginning or origin (as Niebuhr has justly remarked) is beyond the reach of our faculties: we can neither apprehend nor verify anything beyond progress, or development, or decay,[83]—change from one set of circumstances to another, operated by some definite combination of physical or moral laws. In the case of the Greeks, the legendary age, as the earliest in any way known to us, must be taken as the initial state from which this series of changes commences. We must depict its prominent characteristics as well as we can, and show,—partly how it serves to prepare, partly how it forms a contrast to set off,—the subsequent ages of Solôn, of Periklês, and of Demosthenês. [83] Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 55, 2d edit. “Erkennt man aber, dass aller Ursprung jenseits unserer nur Entwickelung und Fortgang fassenden Begriffe liegt; und beschränkt sich von Stufe auf Stufe im Umfang der Geschichte zurückzugehen, so wird man Völker eines Stammes (das heisst, durch eigenthümliche Art und Sprache identisch) vielfach eben an sich entgegenliegenden Küstenländern antreffen ... ohne dass irgend etwas die Voraussetzung erheischte, eine von diesen getrennten Landschaften sei die ursprüngliche Heimath gewesen von wo ein Theil nach der andern gewandert wäre.... Dies ist der Geographie der Thiergeschlechter und der Vegetation analog: deren grosse Bezirke durch Gebürge geschieden werden, and beschränkte Meere einschliessen.”