They said he was mad. Or at best deluded. But Heinrich Schliemann possessed unswerving self-belief, and he was convinced that the greatest epic of antiquity — Homer’s Iliad — told the stories of real people, real places and real historical events. He’d already confounded his critics by excavating Troy, and now he was digging night and day in ancient Mycenae, in Greece. Eventually, he struck gold — literally, uncovering more than a dozen skeletons bedecked with jewels and precious metals. The last of these bore a fabulous gold death mask. Schliemann bent to kiss it — at last he was face to face with the legendary King Agamemnon.

Except that he wasn’t. It’s a shame to spoil the story, but modern dating techniques place the grave finds several hundred years earlier than the Trojan War. Yet Schliemann’s work in the 1870s was certainly not in vain. Here, for the first time, was proof of the wealth and power of the Mycenaean civilisation, which dominated Greece from about 1500 to 1200BC.

Mycenae is at the heart of a region almost embarrassingly overendowed with antiquities. The raw, rippling hills of the Argolid and Corinthia regions, in the northeastern corner of the vast Peloponnese peninsula, are a classicist’s nirvana.

Hercules knocked about in this area, exterminating local nuisances such as the many-headed Hydra of Lerna, the lion of Nemea and the man-eating birds that nested by the Stymphalian Lake (all three are real places). Here, too, are Argos, reputedly the oldest continuously inhabited town in Greece; stout-walled Tiryns; the ruins of Roman Corinth; and the Theatre of Epidaurus, the world’s biggest and best- preserved Greek theatre.

Tour coaches zip between the key sites in a blur of bumbags and blank looks, but to make proper sense of all those piles of stone, you need more than a day. Find a congenial base, then sally out for a snatch of citadel here, a helping of tomb there, as and when the mood takes you. And you’re in luck, because perched on a narrow peninsula on the Argolid Gulf is one of the most seductive towns in mainland Greece.

Navplion was the original capital of independent Greece, where its first president, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was assassinated in 1831 — you can see the bullet hole by the door of the church of St Spiridon. It is also incredibly beautiful, its traffic-free streets paved with multicoloured marble and lined with neoclassical mansions.

You don’t need to do anything in Navplion. The intimacy of its geography, the lazy lapping of the sea and the gentle purr of its tavernas conspire to induce an almost narcotic somnolence in visitors. But if you can shake off your reverie, it has decent museums and a terrific castle to explore.

Commanding the immense outcrop that rises behind Navplion, the Palamidi fortress is named after a polymath Homeric hero whose achievements included the invention of dice. The castle was built by the Venetians in the early 1700s, and can be reached by a daunting 913-step stairway (or, for wimps with wheels, an access road).

There is little specific to see within, but it’s a dream of a place for a scramble. Crenellated walls zigzag maniacally over the hilltop, and there are dingy dungeons and the kind of wide stairways you expect to see Errol Flynn clattering down, cutlass in hand, his foes scattering before him.

If this gives you a taste for romantic ruins, you need travel only a few miles north to journey back a further 3,000 years. In ancient times, the Mycenaean city of Tiryns was famed for the strength of its walls: 23ft thick and twice their current height. Later Greeks dubbed them “cylopean”, believing that only giant Cyclopses could have constructed them.

Schliemann also excavated at Tiryns — in his characteristically cavalier manner, dumping debris from the acropolis all over the walls. Some finds are displayed in Navplion’s archeological museum, along with rare Mycenaean armour, but today the site is unexpectedly peaceful and visitor-free.

You’re unlikely to enjoy similar solitude at Mycenae, a 20-minute drive to the north. Schliemann brought this fabled city to the world’s attention 130 years ago, and it has stayed there ever since. Mycenae was home to the hateful House of Atreus, whose family history took in adultery, incest, murder (lots of it) and cannibalism.

It was just inside the famous Lion Gate, at a place now known as Grave Circle A, that Schliemann believed he had uncovered Atreus’s son Agamemnon and his companions. Homer said they were slaughtered at a banquet on their return from Troy by Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. Not only has Schliemann’s credulous attribution been disproved, there is evidence that he augmented the grave finds (now on display in Athens) with artefacts from elsewhere, and may even have included some newly minted items.

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