ABSTRACT
Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War, asserts without question that it was Theseus, a king of Athens in the period before the Trojan War, who unified Athens and Attica into one polis. The process was traditionally referred to as sunoikismos, ‘living together’, and Thucydides describes it in some detail (Thucydides 2.14.1-2.15.2 and 2.16.1). Many modern historians have questioned Thucydides’ version of the sunoikismos, arguing that even if there was a Mycenaean unification of Attica it probably needed to be done again after the collapse of the Mycenaean world. There certainly seems to be evidence that Eleusis in the west and Marathon on the east coast were incorporated into Attica after the Mycenaean period, but this does not necessarily mean that Attica had been entirely fragmented and had to be reconstituted as a unified state. The truth may be that most of Attica did remain united after the Mycenaean period, but that some extremities had to be reincorporated, perhaps during the eighth century; if it had been later than that one would have expected some clearer historical tradition of which Thucydides would surely have been aware.
