The city of Athens told a founding story in which Athena and Poseidon competed for its patronage. Poseidon struck the Acropolis and produced a spring (or a horse); Athena planted the first olive tree, and the city, judged by its people or its king, chose her gift and her name. The rivalry was not forgotten: Poseidon kept a cult on the same Acropolis, and the arrangement reads as a settlement between two powerful claims rather than a simple victory.
Her great temple, the Parthenon, was built on the Acropolis in the 440s and 430s BCE under Perikles, and housed Pheidias's colossal gold-and-ivory Athena Parthenos. It is important to be exact about function: the Parthenon was as much a treasury and civic monument as a place of daily sacrifice; the older wooden image of Athena Polias, guardian of the city, remained the true cult focus, and it was that image the city clothed in a new robe each year.
The Panathenaia, held every summer and expanded every fourth year into a grand festival, carried a newly woven peplos up to the goddess in a procession that the Parthenon frieze is usually read as depicting, the city presenting itself to its protector.