Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Theseus succeeded Aegeus at Athens, Attica was still a land of scattered demes and independent townships, each with its own prytaneion and magistrates. Plutarch, following the Athenian civic myth also reflected in Thucydides’ archaeology, says Theseus carried out the synoecism (*synoikismos*): he persuaded or compelled the people of Attica to dissolve local councils and merge into a single political community with Athens as capital. He abolished the separate prytaneia, instituted one common council-house and prytaneion in Athens, and left the countryside inhabited but without rival civic centers of power. He is credited with creating a graded citizen body (eupatridae, geomoroi, demiourgoi in Plutarch’s scheme), with enlarging the city, and with founding or reordering the Panathenaea as a festival of the unified people—and the Metoecia (or Synoecia), a feast commemorating the synoecism itself. He was said to have offered the people a kind of constitutional equality under a single laws, resigning absolute kingship’s harsher edges even while remaining war-leader and guardian of the laws—a charter image of the democratic polis projected back onto the hero. The myth explains why Attica, unlike Boeotia’s many cities, looks to one Athens: Theseus, after the Minotaur and the black sails, becomes not only king but the legendary author of Attic unity. Historical synoecism was gradual; the classical city told it as one heroic act.