I’ve never seen a chain-link fence as amusing at the one that surrounds Homer’s “wall-girt Tiryns”. I don’t think the Myceneans would find it as funny—their 3500 year old temple to paranoia and xenophobia, a fortress on the eastern side of the Pelopennese, with its 10 meter thick walls thoughtfully protected by a delicate necklace of 1.5m chain-link.

The stones at Tiryns are so big (some at 14 tons) that Herodotus believed they must have been set in place by Cronos, the father of the giants deposed by the Greek gods. The chain link seems disingenuous.

The visitor today gets to walk up the uninspiring back side (entirely devoid of explanation or history) to the top of the fortress, where crumbling knee-high piles of stone that appear at least twenty years old sketch out crude homes. There’s a better view of the 25m tall walls from the bus that goes by between Nafplio and Argos. ‘Hypotenuse’, ‘erotic’, ‘isoceles’, ‘democracy’—all Greek words. So is ‘anticlimax’.

The 5km walk back to Nafplio took about forty minutes and three liters of water.