Epidaurus was never only a place of incubation. The sanctuary grew into one of the larger building complexes in the Greek world, supporting the pilgrims who traveled to consult Asclepius rather than housing a city of its own. Its theater, built into a natural hillside in the fourth century BCE, seated an estimated twelve to fourteen thousand people and is renowned today for acoustics precise enough that a coin dropped on the circular orchestra floor can reportedly be heard from the topmost row. It still hosts performances each summer. The complex also included a stadium for athletic competitions held in the god's honor, a katagogion, a large guesthouse for visiting pilgrims, a gymnasium, and a circular building called the tholos whose exact ritual function ancient sources do not agree on, though a spiral underground passage beneath it has invited speculation about a serpent enclosure.
The sanctuary's healing cult coexisted with, rather than opposed, the more naturalistic medicine associated with Hippocrates and his successors. Some ancient physicians trained or practiced in sanctuaries of this kind, and the boundary between temple medicine and secular medicine in the ancient world was porous rather than a rivalry between two traditions. Epidaurus continued to draw pilgrims into the Roman period, when the emperor Antoninus Pius funded renovations, and declined only with the rise of Christianity and the closure of pagan sanctuaries in late antiquity. Long since fallen and overgrown, the site was identified and excavated beginning in 1881, and in 1988 UNESCO inscribed the sanctuary as a World Heritage Site, citing it as an outstanding example of a healing center of the ancient world.