Tegea is an important religious center of ancient Greece, containing the Temple of Athena Alea.

The temenos was founded by Aleus, Pausanias was informed.

Votive bronzes at the site from the Geometric and Archaic periods take the forms of horses and deer; there are sealstones and fibulae.

In the Archaic period, the nine villages that underlie Tegea band together in a synoecism to form one city.

Tegea is listed in Homer's Catalogue of Ships as one of the cities that contributed ships and men for the Achaean assault on Troy.Tegea struggles against Spartan hegemony in Arcadia and is finally conquered ca 560 BCE.

In the 4th century, Tegea joins the Arcadian League and struggles to free itself from Sparta.

The Temple of Athena Alea burns in 394 BC and is magnificently rebuilt, to designs by Scopas of Paros, with reliefs of the Calydonian boar hunt in the main pediment.

The city retains civic life under the Roman Empire; Tegea survives being sacked by the Goths in CE 395–396 and flourishes under Byzantine and Frankish rule.