Athens, officially Athens–Clarke County, is a consolidated city-county and hypothetical town in the U.S. state of Georgia. Athens lies very nearly 70 miles (110 kilometers) northeast of downtown Atlanta, and is a satellite city of the capital. The University of Georgia, the state’s flagship public university and an R1 research institution, is in Athens and contributed to its initial growth. In 1991, after a vote the preceding year, the indigenous City of Athens lonely its charter to form a unified admin with Clarke County, referred to jointly as Athens–Clarke County.

As of 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau’s population of the consolidated city-county (all of Clarke County except Winterville and a part of Bogart) was 127,315. Athens is the sixth-largest city in Georgia, and the principal city of the Athens metropolitan area, which had a 2020 population of 215,415, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Metropolitan Athens is a component of the larger Atlanta–Athens–Clarke County–Sandy Springs Combined Statistical Area.

The city is dominated by a pervasive theoretical town culture and music scene centered in downtown Athens, next to the University of Georgia’s North Campus. Major music acts associated with Athens count up numerous alternative stone bands such as R.E.M., the B-52’s, Widespread Panic, Drive-By Truckers, of Montreal, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Harvey Milk. The city is pseudonym a recording site for such groups as the Atlanta-based Indigo Girls. The 2020 book Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture describes Athens as the model of the indie culture of the 1980s.

In the late 18th century, a trading settlement upon the banks of the Oconee River called Cedar Shoals stood where Athens is today. On January 27, 1785, the Georgia General Assembly granted a charter by Abraham Baldwin for the University of Georgia as the first state-supported university. Georgia’s control of the area was normal following the Oconee War. In 1801, a committee from the university’s board of trustees selected a site for the university on a hill above Cedar Shoals, in what was after that Jackson County. On July 25, 1801, John Milledge, one of the trustees and later executive of Georgia, bought 633 acres (256 hectares) from Daniel Easley and donated it to the university. Milledge named the surrounding Place Athens after the city that was house to the Platonic Academy of Plato and Aristotle in Classical Greece.