Ancient Greece and News

So we'll start with the news: my awesome cousin has an Oscar nominated documentary! It's pretty awesome.

Also the other day I got to see some of my friends, one of whom is probably going to be a famous scholar someday in history. He's learning/studying ancient Greek right now and so we got to talking about the ancient Greeks and their amazing art. So we know ancient statues to be plain marble (beautiful marble but unadorned) but we have evidence that that's not the way they were originally, was actually painted marble. I haven't been sure how I felt about that, as all I've ever known are the unpainted marbles and bronzes and I feel they're beautiful as they are, it's hard for me to see how they could be improved by color.
My friend was telling me that a tomb or something like that was recently discovered untouched and inside were painted statues, they were able to document them and find out what the paints were comprised of - crushed gemstones, I would really love to be able to see a picture of what that would look like.
We also talked about how insanely precise the Greeks were, probably specifically in the golden or Hellenistic period, like in pottery they were so precise that they'd take shrinking into account during firing - that's a lot. Anyway my friend tells me that the Greeks didn't have much use for numbers, that's so crazy to me. For sure I'm a believer of compass and straight edge geometry rather than number geometry, but the thought of not using numbers at all for something like the Parthenon? It's way hard to wrap my head around that. Art, it's super awesome!