Attica's villages lost their independence only when Cleisthenes redrew the map
Legend says twelve small communities of Attica were merged into Athens by the mythical king Theseus. Historians think the absorption was slower, stretching through the 8th and 7th centuries BC or later. Local aristocrats kept their own power until Cleisthenes, in 508/7 BC, carved the peninsula into about a hundred demes answering to Athens.
Attica is a triangular peninsula pushing into the Aegean, fenced off from Boeotia by the Cithaeron and Parnes ranges and joined to the Peloponnese through Megaris and the Isthmus of Corinth. Four mountains, Aigaleo, Parnitha, Penteli and Hymettus, ring the plain where Athens now sprawls, and hills such as the Acropolis and Lykavittos rise from it. Silver mines at Laurion in the south helped fund classical Athens. Pausanias says the land was first called Actaea and later renamed for Atthis, daughter of King Cranaus.
Athenians liked to claim they were autochthonous, sprung from their own soil, even as classical stories told of Ionian refugees settling there in the Dark Ages. Cleisthenes' reform sorted the demes into three zones: the city with Piraeus, the coast from Eleusis to Cape Sounion, and the inland Mesogeia. During the Peloponnesian War Spartan armies repeatedly raided the countryside and eventually fortified Decelea inside Attica itself. Religious life spread well beyond the Acropolis: the cult of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis ran from Mycenaean times to late antiquity, Artemis was honoured at Brauron and Dionysus at Icaria.
Later centuries were rough. The Heruli sacked Athens and ravaged the countryside in 267 AD, and Alaric's Goths invaded in 396. From the 14th century Arvanites arrived from what is now southern Albania, mostly invited as mercenaries by Greek lords. Under Ottoman rule Athens kept some privileges but the villages did not, and monasteries helped keep Greek communities alive. Ancient place names such as Marathon and Eleusis survived it all.
Attica's farmers were the first to rise in the War of Independence, in April 1821, and the Acropolis passed to the revolutionaries in June 1822. Once Athens became the capital in 1834, people from across Greece moved in, followed by refugees from Anatolia after the population exchanges with Turkey. Athens' main reservoir, Lake Marathon, is artificial, created by a dam in 1920.
Source: Attica
