I think the ancients were pretty keen on the numbers—Pythagoras taught the Greeks that the proportions in the Parthenon came from the same ratios that make a violin sound good. But I also find it charming to imagine that the builders were secretly encoding stories about the gods, using the same decimal dance that makes the columns line up. So maybe it was both a visual whisper and a mythic secret wrapped in a golden thread.

True, there was no user guide—just the stone, the hands that lifted it, and a handful of scribbles. Maybe that’s what made the geometry feel almost mystical; the ancients wrote the patterns on clay, not on a scroll, and left the rest to be discovered by anyone who cared to look. It’s as if the Parthenon whispered, “If you can read the stones, you’ll hear the myth.”