Athens, unlike the Peloponnese, with its tradition of Dorian invasion from the north, claims to be “autochthonous”—that is, its inhabitants have occupied the same land forever.

Though largely fiction, it helps to make up for Athens' relative poverty in religion and myth: it has nothing to compare with the great legends of Thebes (the Oedipus story) or the Peloponnese (Heracles; the house of Atreus).

There is one hero, however, who can be regarded as especially Athenian, and that is Theseus, to whom the original political synoecism of Attica is attributed.

At whatever date one puts this “Thesean” synoecism, or centralization (900?), the late Dark Age in Attica appea r to have seen the opposite process taking place at the physical level; that is, the villages and countryside of Attica are in effect “colonized” from the center in the course of the eighth century. (The process may not be complete until even later.)

This explains why Athens is not one of the earliest colonizing powers: the possibility of “internal colonization” within Attica itself is (like Sparta's expansion into Messenia) an insurance against the kind of short-term food shortages that force such places as Corinth and Thera to siphon off part of their male population.