Every summer, on a date reckoned near what corresponds to the goddess's mythical birthday, Athens closed its ordinary business and turned toward the Acropolis. The smaller, annual Panathenaea combined animal sacrifice at the great altar of Athena, a distribution of the meat among citizens, athletic and musical competitions open to entrants from beyond Athens itself, and an all-night vigil by young women called pannychis, with torch races that some ancient sources connect to Athena's role as a bringer of fire and craft to humanity. The festival's central act, though, was the procession, a formal march from the Kerameikos cemetery and civic center through the Agora and up to the Acropolis, in which magistrates, priests, resident foreigners, cavalry and ordinary citizens all took a designated place, culminating in the delivery of the year's woven peplos to the ancient statue of Athena Polias.
The Panathenaea is generally treated by historians as reorganized into something like its Classical form in 566 BCE, under circumstances tradition attributes to Peisistratus' circle, when the athletic and musical competitions were added or formalized alongside the older religious observance. Whatever the exact prehistory, from that point the festival becomes a fixture of the Athenian civic and religious calendar, and prize amphorae from the games, filled with sacred olive oil and stamped with an image of Athena, have survived in enough numbers across the Mediterranean world to trace how far Athenian visitors and honored competitors carried them home.