The remains lay on the ground for over 800 years, and even broken, they were so impressive that many travelled to see them. Ptolemy III offered to pay for the reconstruction of the statue, but an oracle made the Rhodians afraid that they had offended Helios, and they declined to rebuild it. The statue snapped at the knees and fell over onto the land. The statue stood for only fifty-six years until Rhodes was hit by an earthquake in 224 BC. The statue itself was over 34 metres (110 feet) tall.Īfter twelve years, in 280 BC, the great statue was completed. Upper portions were built with the use of a large earthen ramp. Much of the iron and bronze was reforged from the various weapons Demetrius's army left behind, and the abandoned second siege tower was used for scaffolding around the lower levels during construction. Iron beams were embedded in the stone towers, and bronze plates attached to the bars formed the visible skin of the sculpture. Other sources place the Colossus on a breakwater in the harbour. In order to pay for the construction of the Colossus, the Rhodians sold all of the siege equipment that Demetrius left behind in front of their city.Ĭolossus of Rhodes, imagined in a 16th-century engraving by Martin Heemskerck, part of his series of the Seven Wonders of the WorldĪncient accounts (which differ to some degree) describe the structure as being built around several stone columns (or towers of blocks) forming the interior of the structure, which stood on a fifteen-meter-high (fifty-foot) white marble pedestal near the Mandraki harbour entrance. His teacher, the famed sculptor Lysippus, had constructed a sixty-foot-high statue of Zeus. Construction was left to the direction of Chares, a native of Rhodes, who had been involved with large-scale statues before. To celebrate their victory, the Rhodians decided to build a giant statue of their patron god, Helios. Despite his failure at Rhodes, Demetrius earned the nickname Poliorcetes by his successes elsewhere. In 304 BC a relief force of ships sent by Ptolemy arrived, and Demetrius's army left in a hurry, leaving most of their siege equipment. He tried again with an even larger land-based tower named Helepolis, but the Rhodian defenders stopped this by flooding the land in front of the walls so that the rolling tower could not move. The first was mounted on six ships, but these were capsized in a storm before they could be used. However, the city was well defended, and Demetrius-whose name "Poliorcetes" signifies the "besieger of cities"-had to start construction of a number of massive siege towers in order to gain access to the walls. In 305 BC he had his son Demetrius Poliorcetes (now a famous general in his own right) invade Rhodes with an army of 40,000. During the fighting Rhodes had sided with Ptolemy, and when Ptolemy eventually took control of Egypt, Rhodes and Ptolemaic Egypt formed an alliance which controlled much of the trade in the eastern Mediterranean.Īnother of Alexander's generals, Antigonus I Monophthalmus, was upset by this turn of events. Fighting broke out among his generals, the Diadochi, with three of them eventually dividing up much of his empire in the Mediterranean area. It is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.Īlexander the Great died at an early age in 323 BC without having had time to put into place any plans for his succession. It was roughly the same size as the Statue of Liberty in New York, although it stood on a lower platform. The Colossus of Rhodes was a giant statue of the Greek god Helios, erected on the Greek island of Rhodes by Chares of Lindos, a pupil of Lysippos, between 292 and 280 BC. This drawing of Colossus of Rhodes, which illustrated The Grolier Society's 1911 Book of Knowledge, is probably fanciful, as it is unlikely that the statue stood astride the harbour mouth.
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