How the heck am I going to design that big fat Greek support column?
Well, you should have asked how to design the Golden Gate Bridge , an engineering marvel of its times. Greeks knew very little of what we call today structural engineering and still built those columns; so it is not that difficult to design them!
FYI, Big Fat Greek columns are too fat to buckle and hence fail only by crushing (technically, shear or compression failure). An easy formula to design them would be select a cross sectional area larger than the materials shear or compression strength (times any factor of safety you prefer/ building code requires)
