The Mycenaean civilization was in the late Bronze Age, from about 1700 to 1100 BC.  The Lion Gate you see at right was built to enclose the walls surrounding a series of circular graves of the highly dysfunctional family that was buried here.

If you wanted to create a nighttime soap opera, you couldn't find a better plot than in Mycenae. It was a story of great wealth, war, and betrayal. Spicing it up were incest, cannibalism and the wrath of the gods. 

But the Mycenaean civilization was very advanced. Its alphabet was a forerunner to ancient Greek. The feudal society included shepherds, bakers, metal workers, textile makers, and potters. The society had a governing structure and possibly a structured military. Royalty were buried in grand circular tombs called tholos, and in fact that's most of what is left of the site in ancient Mycenae. 

The old theater at Epidavros (or Epidaurus) is the best-preserved ancient theater in existence. From the late fourth century BC, it seated about 14,000 people. The acoustics are so good that people claim that you can hear a coin drop on stage from the top row. When we stood at the top seats, a man was clapping slowly on stage, and you could actually see the clap a split-second before you could hear it.

The primary purpose of this ancient site, though, is that it housed the Temple of Asclepius. Asclepius probably was a real person who lived in the thirteenth century BC. He became such a celebrity that his birthright was redesigned so that he became the son of the Greek god Apollo. Asclepius was a healer, using sleep, hypnotism, and frequent washing as his tools. He is often shown with a staff and a snake, or a snake wrapped around a staff, a symbol our medical community still uses.

This seaside community, Navplion, is at the top of the Argolic Gulf. The Venetian fortress overlooking the town is called Palamídi. It was built in the early eighteenth century as the most technologically capable fortress of its time, able to withstand all current military artillery.  The year after it was built, it fell to the Ottomans after a one-week siege.

Navplion was the capital of Greece, starting in 1829 after its War of Independence with Turkey, until Athens was selected in 1834. It is said to be the thirteenth-century-BC birthplace of Palimedes, credited with a variety of inventions. His life's work included the invention of lighthouses, the art of navigation, coins, the Greek alphabet, numbers, eating at regular intervals, and the games of dice and knucklebones. It's more likely that this biography is a composite of many people, and possibly of the Phoenician culture, often associated with many of these inventions.