The unique profile and history of Athens spawned Pericles and provided him with the raw material and tools with which he constructed his career. While sharing many characteristics with their Greek contemporaries, the fifth-century Athenians possessed unusual traits and traditions that would ultimately play considerable roles in Athens’ rise to political and cultural hegemony.

The Athenians’ heroic-age heritage was weak and suspect compared with the traditions of Thebes, Sparta, Argos, and even (by the classical age, relatively backward) Thessaly. The fame of the Athenians’ national hero Theseus rested largely on remedial feats that all too often mimicked those of the great Herakles, merely placed Athens on a more equal footing with other important Hellenic states, or transplanted classical Athenian accomplishments (especially democracy) to the heroic past. The Athenians’ claim to “autochthony” – the idea that they were Attica's original inhabitants, sprung from the very soil – perhaps bespeaks a recognition of their tenuous connection with the great Hellenic achievements and migrations of the late or just post-heroic age, including the return of the descendants of Herakles and the wanderings of the Ionian Greeks.

Ultimately the Athenians would make much of their claim to have offered organization, protection, and respite to the Ionian Greeks (who were on their way to Asia Minor and the islands). Their putative role as metropolis (“mother city”) to these Hellenes came to figure prominently in tyrannic and democratic imperial propaganda. Yet the Ionian connection cut two ways, and the Athenians appear to have been acutely aware of the disadvantages the connection transmitted when it came to their mainland (and often Dorian) Greek neighbors. The latter saw the Ionian branch of the Greek people as weak, effeminate, and inured to luxury and slavery.

Indeed, while inhabiting the largely Doric (and Aeolic) mainland, the Athenians had much in common with the Ionian islanders to their east. Athens’ external ambitions looked to the Aegean long before attempting major conquests on the mainland. The Athenians had already incorporated the nearby island of Salamis by the early sixth century, and not long after this they began a pursuit of interests in the northeastern Aegean and Hellespont that would not end until the age of Alexander.