This transition period was subsequently called by the Hellenes the Heroic Age. The myths and legends which the memory of the Greek tribes and their poets preserved of this period have a varied character. On the one hand, heroic figures are repeatedly developed from the local names or the surnames of divinities, or the mythical history of a god is transferred to a human being. On the other hand, this imaginative people loved to concentrate its historical recollections and to load the deeds and experiences of whole tribes and epochs upon one or another heroic personality, whose cycle of legends in the course of further development underwent new colourings and extensions through the mixture of fresh elements. This is the way in which the legends of Hercules and Theseus, of the Argonauts and the “Seven against Thebes” grew up. The most glorious poetical illumination is cast upon the alleged greatest deed of pre-Hellenic times, the ten years’ war waged by nearly the whole body of Achæan heroes against the Teucrian Troy or Ilion. The warlike, chivalrous-romantic nation of poetry and legendary history at the close of the pre-Hellenic period we are accustomed to call the Achæans. It seems to us safe to accept the theory that the name Achæans means “the noble, excellent,” and belongs to the entire “hero-nation,” not to a single tribe after which the Greeks as a whole were afterwards called. At least a few important remains of the tribal and state relations of this age passed over into the Hellenic period. The Dorians were at this time an insignificant mountain race in the mountains on the northern edge of the beautiful basin of northeastern Greece, which had not yet received the name of Thessaly, while the principal part was played there by the Lapithæ on Mount Ossa and the lower Peneus, the Bœotians in the southwest of the Peneus district, and especially the Minyæ, with one branch at Iolcus on the gulf of Pagasæ and another in the western part of the basin of the Copaïs, where they were in constant rivalry with the Cadmeans of Thebes. The Ionic race was spread over the northern coast of the Peloponnesus on the Gulf of Corinth, over a portion of the eastern coast of this peninsula on the Gulf of Saron, and over Megaris and Attica. Among the Ionic cantons Attica had already attained considerable importance. Here the so-called Theseus, or rather a family of warlike chieftains descended from the Ionic tribal hero Theseus, had succeeded in uniting the four different portions of this district.