Secret Plato

Supposedly hidden message are being discovered quite often these days. First da Vinci, then Michelangelo, now Plato.

From NPR...

Looking at Plato's works in their original scroll form, he noticed that every 12 lines there was a passage that discussed music. "The regularity of that pattern was supposed to be noticed by Plato's readers," Kennedy says.

Music in ancient Greece was based on a 12-note scale. Kennedy posits that Plato deliberately inserted discussions of music every 12 lines to send a secret, musical message. What Plato couldn't tell people was that he was a closet Pythagorean. Pythagoras and his followers believed that mathematics and music were the key to the universe.

But the Pythagoreans were a persecuted sect, sometimes violently persecuted. "They were a threat to traditional religion, like many new sects." Plato's own teacher, Socrates, was famously executed for religious heresy.