The name Pallene carried an old and violent legend. During the Gigantomachy - the great war between the Olympian gods and the giants - Athena is said to have slain the giant Pallas here, flayed him, and turned his skin into a cloak. Another version names the victim not as Pallas but as the Gorgon. The same ground threads into one of Athens' founding myths. When the earth-born child Erichthonius was born of Hephaestus and Gaia, Athena entrusted the infant in a basket to the daughters of Cecrops, then traveled to Pallene to fetch a great rock to anchor a temple for herself on the Acropolis. A crow brought word that the daughters had disobeyed and opened the basket. In her fury, Athena dropped the stone - and where it fell, the Athenians said, it became Mount Lycabettus, the cone of rock that still dominates the city's skyline.

Myth made Pallene a battlefield long before history did. The fifty sons of Pallas, the Pallantidae, went to war against their cousin Theseus over the throne of Athens. Marching from Sphettus across the inland plain of the Mesogaea, Pallas hid part of his force in ambush at nearby Gargettus, commanded by two of his sons, who were to fall on the city by surprise once battle was joined. But the plan was betrayed by Pallas' own herald, Leos of Hagnous, and Theseus turned and cut the ambushers to pieces. The ancient writers claimed the treachery left a lasting feud between the people of Pallene and those of Hagnous - a grudge remembered for generations. In the aftermath, Theseus is said to have married his son Hippolytus to Aricia, the sister of his defeated rival.

Stripped of legend, Pallene's real importance came from its geography. It sat where several roads from the Mesogaea converged on their way into Athens, and it lay on one of the routes between the city and the plain of Marathon. That made it a place where armies met. The most famous clash came around 546 BC, when Peisistratus returned from exile to make his third bid for power. Landing near Marathon and marching inland, he caught the Athenian army off guard at Pallene, by the temple of Athena Pallenis - some sources say in the drowsy heat of midday, while his enemies rested. He scattered the aristocratic Alcmaeonidae, drove their leaders into exile, and seized Athens. His rule, secured on this ground, would last until his death and shape the city for a generation.

The temple of Athena Pallenis is gone, but the ground gave up its traces. Between the old monastery of Ieraka and the small village of Charvati, antiquarians recovered a celebrated inscription recording money owed to temples - probably once housed in the sanctuary itself. Nearby came the boustrophedon inscription of Aristocles, its lines reading alternately left to right and right to left like a plowed field, almost certainly from the same temple. In a local church the nineteenth-century historian George Finlay found yet another inscription, naming a man simply as 'of Pallene.' These fragments are the modern visitor's closest contact with the place - stone records of a community that worshipped, fought, and remembered here, now folded quietly beneath the everyday suburb of Gerakas.