Pellene's ancient names tell its own creation story twice over: its inhabitants traced the name to the giant Pallas, while the Argives attributed it to Pellen, son of Phorbas of Argos. Neither tradition can be verified, but both place the city's origins in a mythological register that the Greeks reserved for places of genuine antiquity. The Homeric Catalogue of Ships — the long inventory of forces that sailed for Troy, embedded in the second book of the Iliad — names Pellene among the Achaean contingents. That reference made it authoritative: if Homer knew it, it was old. Thucydides, writing centuries later, reported that the people of Scione in the Macedonian peninsula of Pallene claimed descent from Achaean Pallenians driven onto the Macedonian coast on their return from Troy. Whether this was accurate genealogy or convenient mythology, the claim connected Pellene to the great Greek self-narrating tradition centered on the Trojan War.

When the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BCE, Pellene stood alone among the Achaean cities in siding with Sparta. The other Achaean towns initially maintained neutrality; Pellene committed. Why Pellene chose differently from its neighbors is not explained in the sources — perhaps commercial ties, perhaps aristocratic preference, perhaps the particular disposition of its ruling families at that moment. Whatever the reason, the choice made Pellene an outlier in its own region, a city whose political alignment put it at odds with the Achaean mainstream. The other states eventually followed the Spartan alliance, but Pellene had declared first. The city would spend the next several centuries being contested, captured, and recaptured as the power balances of the Peloponnese shifted. In 241 BCE, the Aetolian League raided Pellene, and Aratus of Sicyon expelled them in what became known as the Battle of Pellene.

In the time of Alexander the Great, Pellene fell under the control of one of its own citizens: a man named Chaeron, described in the sources as a distinguished athlete who had won at the Olympic Games — specifically as a wrestler, victorious sometime between 356 and 344 BCE. With Alexander's backing, Chaeron raised himself to tyranny over the city. The combination of athletic prestige and political ambition was not unusual in the Greek world, where victory at the great games conferred a kind of quasi-divine status and real political capital. But Chaeron's case is particularly vivid: an Olympian returning home not to retirement but to power, his championship used as social leverage and his patron Alexander the Great as his guarantor. Pellene had produced other Olympians before Chaeron — the runner Phanas won in 512 BCE, Sostratus in 460, Promachus in the pankration in 404. The city's athletic record was strong enough that these victories, and Chaeron's, formed a coherent tradition.

Pausanias, traveling through the northern Peloponnese in the 2nd century CE, recorded what he found at Pellene: a temple of Athena with a statue attributed to Pheidias (one of the earlier works of that master sculptor, according to local tradition); a temple of Dionysus Lampter, in whose honor the Lampteria festival was held; a temple of Apollo Theoxenius, whose festival the Theoxenia brought visitors to the city; a gymnasium. Further out, 60 stadia from the city, lay the Mysaeum — a sanctuary of the Mysian Demeter — and near it a temple of Asclepius, called Cyrus, where springs rose copiously from the ground. Ancient writers also mention a nearby village of the same name, Pellene, celebrated for manufacturing a distinctive kind of heavy cloak. These cloaks were given as prizes in the athletic contests held in the city — a practical prize, since the Corinthian mountains are cold in winter, which is when the contests were apparently held.

The ruins of ancient Pellene lie southwest of modern Xylokastro, on the northern coast of the Peloponnese, not far inland from the Gulf of Corinth. The site has not been extensively excavated; what remains visible is largely the elevated terrain of the ancient hilltop citadel, the topography that Pellene always used as its first defense. The city that Homer listed, that sent ships to Troy, that stood with Sparta, that produced Olympic champions and a wrestler-tyrant, that Pausanias catalogued temple by temple — it is mostly underground now, its marble carried off for building material through the medieval centuries, its springs still rising in the hills around Xylokastro. The Achaean League that Pellene helped constitute was dissolved by Rome in 146 BCE. The city's long story was folded into a larger one, and the hilltop fell quiet.