Mycenæ and Tiryns, linked in tradition with the name of Perseus, both sent men to Platæa to fight against the Persians. In a little more than a decade thereafter they were both captured and destroyed by Argos, jealous of their proximity and of their place on the national roll of honour from which she had excluded herself. At the end of another decade Æschylus chose to flatter the Argives, just then the allies of Athens, by transferring from Mycenæ to their town the scene of the “Agamemnon.” In addition to the plain of Argolis the “Akte,” or peninsula proper, has its own history and associations. Leaving Tiryns and Nauplia behind, the road to the inland Epidaurus sanctuary is overlooked from the north by the naked ridge of Mount Arachneum, from which flashed to the palace roof at Argos the last relay of flame in the chain of beacons. The Epidaurian Asclepieum claimed the honour of the birth of the god of healing, the foundling son of Apollo, who was suckled by a goat. From this parent sanatorium others were established throughout Greece. The Athenians even called “Epidauria” one of the days used for the worship of Asclepius. In a fragmentary hymn to the god, found at Athens, reference is made to the oracle quoted by Pausanias as beginning: “Great joy for mortals all thy birth, Asclepius! Thou, love-child of Koronis and my own, wast born in rugged Epidaurus!” In the precinct of this famous health-resort was found a tablet inscribed with a hymn by Isyllus, an Epidaurian poet, containing the genealogy of the god’s mother and telling how Apollo named the child and called him “Destroyer of disease, Health-giver, mighty Gift to men.” Homer’s epithet for Epidaurus is “abounding in vines,” and in later days Dionysus was not neglected. The auditorium, with the circle of the orchestra still completely marked by a sunken rim of stone, is the most beautiful and the best preserved of the theatres in Greece, and one may here better than at Athens imagine the _mise-en-scène_ of the great dramas for which the Argolid furnished so largely the subject matter. The opening scene of the “Ion” of Plato brings before us the star rhapsodist of his day, relating how he is just back from the Asclepius festival at Epidaurus where the Epidaurians held a contest, not only in his own specialty of reciting Homer but in lyric poetry besides. In Epidaurus were celebrated the usual games, as the well-preserved Stadium testifies and as we know from more than one passage of Pindar. In the Abaton, now more fully excavated, have been found some of the tablets dedicated by grateful patients who had been cured by sleeping in the precinct. Cures of blindness, palsy, ulcers, dropsy, internal maladies and external wounds are recorded in this medical literature, which Strabo tells us was here displayed in great abundance, as in the great Sanatorium of Hippocrates on the island of Cos.