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A TOUR TO OUR HISTORIC SITES

Argos, a town in the Peloponnese Region, near Corinth. Argos dates from the Bronze Age and is believed to be the oldest city in Greece. In the Homeric Age, Argos was reputedly ruled by the warrior Diomedes. The city subsequently became part of the Mycenaean civilization. In historic times, specifically during the reign of King Pheidon ( 7th century BC), Argos was the most powerful city-state in the Peloponnese. After a disastrous protracted struggle with Sparta in the 5th century BC, Argos lost power and influence. In 229 BC it joined the Achaean League, and it became part of the Roman province of Achaea in 146 BC. During the late Middle Ages, Argos was part of the Byzantine Empire. The Turks held the city from 1460 until 1830. In the 1820s, during the Greek struggle for independence, the city served briefly as the seat of the Greek National Assembly. A Turkish army sacked the city in 1825. The present city is an important railway junction and is noted for the ruins of a temple to the Greek goddess Hera.

Mycenae, an ancient town on the Argolis plain, gave its name to the culture developed in mainland Greece during the late phase of the Bronze Age civilization. The ruins of the city are near the modern town of Mikenai. Other great centers of Mycenaean culture included Tiryns and Pylos. The Mycenaeans, celebrated by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which he calls them Achaeans, may have been the tribes that arrived in Greece around 2000 BC as part of the Indo-European migration. Their language, an early Greek dialect, was written in a script known as Linear B (see Minoan Culture). About 1400 BC Mycenae reached its height as the center of Aegean Civilization, dominated before that time by the Minoans from Crete. In the age of the Trojan War described in Homer's epics, Mycenae was the home of King Agamemnon from the house of Atreus and the leading city in the Greek world. About 1200 BC the supremacy of Mycenae came to an end, perhaps because of interstate rivalry, which was compounded about a century later by the successful invasion of another Greek people, the Dorians, from the north. The city, although later inhabited anew, never regained its former splendor. About 468 BC it was again besieged and destroyed, this time by the inhabitants of Argos, and never rebuilt.

The ruins of Mycenae include the massive walls termed Cyclopean because they were thought to have been built by the like-named giants; the famous Lion Gate; and the beehive tombs excavated (1876-1878) by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, which are known locally as the Treasury of Atreus and the Tomb of Clytemnestra. Remnants of a great palace at Tiryns were also unearthed (1884-1885) by Schliemann.

Epidaurus, an ancient Greek city on the east coast of Argolis on the Gulf of Saronikos. Epidaurus was an important commercial center and the site of a temple dedicated to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. On the modern site is a museum of classical antiquities and a restored 14,000-seat amphitheater in which a world-famous festival of ancient Greek drama is held each summer. Another city of the same name, Epidaurus Limera, was located on the east coast of Laconia.

A detailed map of ancient Greece

more info about Greek Mythology and History
http://hsa.brown.edu/~maicar/index.html