The Oeteans occupied the region of Oetaea or Oitaia (Οἰταῖα), encompassing Mount Oeta and its northern and southern outliers, bounded by the Spercheios River to the north and east and the Boeotic Cephissus to the south.

[3] The 1st-century geographer Strabo claims that Oetaea was divided into fourteen demes, but their exact identity is uncertain, and modern attempts to reconstruct them include mutilated names and toponyms that are scarcely attested.

[5] Aetolian domination lasted until c. 166 BC, after which the Oetaean League (Ancient Greek: τὸ κοινὸν τῶν Οἰταῖων, romanized: to koinon ton Oitaion) is attested in inscriptions.

The League's chief city and seat of its treasury was Heraclea, and two federal bodies are attested, the magistrates known as boularcheontes and the priestly college of the hierothytai.

[6] By the 1st century BC, when Greece was firmly under Roman rule, the Oetaeans disappeared from the sources, and Oetaea itself was counted as part of Thessaly.