Athens developed in Attica, the peninsula of southeastern mainland Greece, not in the Peloponnese. The Acropolis preserves evidence of Neolithic occupation, and its summit became a fortified centre in the Mycenaean period. The surviving circuit associated with that Bronze Age stronghold dates to the thirteenth century BCE. These remains establish a history of settlement; they do not establish the existence of the earth-born kings who appear in later stories. Athenian tradition used such figures to express attachment to the land. Their autochthony, or birth from the earth, was a claim about collective ancestry and belonging, not an archaeological demonstration that every inhabitant shared one origin.

Cecrops is central to that legendary past. He is usually represented as a ruler with a human upper body and a serpent's lower body, though sources differ over whether he or an earlier figure such as Actaeus was the first king. The land was said to have been called Cecropia during his rule. Traditions attributed marriage customs, religious practices and civic beginnings to him, making him an ancestor through whom Athenians could describe the emergence of ordered life. His family also connected the city with the gods: his daughters Aglaurus, Herse and Pandrosos appear in the story of the infant Erichthonius.

The contest between Athena and Poseidon explains the city's patronage and name. Poseidon strikes the Acropolis with his trident and produces a saltwater spring, while Athena plants an olive tree. The spring and tree are signs of divine possession as well as competing gifts. The details of the judgement vary. In the account preserved by Apollodorus, Zeus appoints the twelve gods as arbiters, and Cecrops witnesses Athena's claim; he is not simply the sole judge of the competition. Athena receives the land, and the city takes its name from her. Poseidon responds by flooding part of Attica. The story gives the landscape a divine history without being an account of how its geology or earliest settlement was actually formed.

Erichthonius provides another connection between the land and its goddess. In Apollodorus, Hephaestus tries to force himself upon Athena, and his semen reaches the earth after she resists him. Gaia brings forth Erichthonius, whom Athena takes under her protection. She places him in a chest and entrusts it to Cecrops's daughters with a command not to look inside. Pandrosos obeys, but Aglaurus and Herse open it. They see a serpent associated with the child, and their punishment is told in differing forms: death by the serpent or a fatal leap in madness. The infant should not automatically be described as having the same half-serpent body as Cecrops in every version.

Erichthonius grows into a king of Athens. Apollodorus attributes to him the setting up of a wooden image of Athena and the institution of the Panathenaia, as well as a close association with the four-horse chariot. Such stories place a civic festival and its sacred objects within heroic time. They are different from the historical development and later enlargement of the festival. Erichthonius is also said to have been buried in Athena's sacred precinct. The traditions surrounding him and Erechtheus became intertwined with the Acropolis's religious landscape, but those names and their stories should not be treated as interchangeable in every source.

The royal genealogy then runs through several generations. The Pandion who follows Erichthonius is not simply the same Pandion who is the father of Aegeus. The king-list preserved by Apollodorus includes Erechtheus, another Cecrops and a later Pandion before reaching Aegeus and his brothers. Aegeus receives Athens within a division of the family's territory and seeks an heir of his own. After consulting Delphi, he visits Pittheus at Troezen and sleeps with Pittheus's daughter Aethra. Theseus is born from this encounter, although Poseidon also has a claim to his paternity in the myth. Aegeus leaves a sword and sandals beneath a heavy stone as tokens by which the grown child may prove his identity.

Theseus travels to Athens by the dangerous land route, overcoming a sequence of violent opponents and the Crommyonian Sow. The familiar encounters include Periphetes, Sinis, Sciron, Cercyon and Procrustes, each associated with a particular threat to travellers. At Athens, Medea attempts to have the newcomer killed before Aegeus recognises the sword he carries. Theseus later volunteers to accompany the young Athenians sent as tribute to Crete. The tribute consists of young people destined for the Minotaur, not the monster itself. With Ariadne's help, he kills the creature and escapes the Labyrinth. His failure to change the returning ship's black sail leads Aegeus to believe him dead and to take his own life.

As king, Theseus is credited with the synoecism of Attica: bringing its communities under a shared civic centre. Thucydides and Plutarch preserve versions of this tradition, which connected a later political community with a heroic founder. Plutarch also associates Theseus with a Panathenaic festival for the united population. This is not evidence that one identifiable hero personally created classical democracy, nor does it erase traditions crediting earlier kings with the festival's beginnings. Later in his story, opposition associated with Menestheus contributes to Theseus's loss of power. He goes to Scyros, where Lycomedes causes his death. The recovery of remains believed to be his subsequently becomes part of Athenian civic memory.

Historical Athens developed institutions whose membership and powers changed over time. In its classical democracy, political participation was centred on adult male citizens, not every free person living in the city. Women, enslaved people and resident foreigners were excluded from citizenship's political rights. The assembly, council and popular courts nevertheless gave participating citizens substantial direct roles in public decisions. The Agora supported civic business, exchange and conversation, while religious festivals supported the performance of tragedy and comedy. Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides belong to this historical cultural setting rather than to the genealogies of its legendary kings.

After the Persian destruction of 480 BCE, rebuilding eventually transformed the Acropolis. The fifth-century programme associated with Pericles included the Parthenon and Propylaia, while the Erechtheion belonged to a later phase of that century, after his death. These monuments expressed religious devotion and the resources and ambitions of their community. Athens subsequently passed through Macedonian, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman periods, each leaving its own changes in the city's buildings and uses of space. Its long history is not a single unchanged golden age. The enduring connection between city and goddess rests instead on the repeated retelling of its myths alongside the survival and reinterpretation of its physical remains.