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The Colossus of Rhodes
The bronze sun god that stood over a Greek harbor city for barely half a century
The Colossus of Rhodes had one of the shortest lives of any wonder and one of the longest afterlives. A bronze statue of the sun god Helios, about 33 meters tall, it was raised by the people of Rhodes to give thanks for surviving a year-long siege, and it stood for only about 54 years before an earthquake broke it at the knees. Yet the fallen giant remained a sight for travelers for centuries, and its image, usually drawn wrongly straddling the harbor mouth, still shapes how people picture ancient ambition. Its fame lives on in the word colossal, and the sonnet on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty names that statue the New Colossus.
Rhodes is the largest of the Dodecanese islands, lying off the southwestern tip of Anatolia, and its capital spreads across the island's northern point. The statue's exact site is unknown. Its legs could not have spanned the harbor entrance, as medieval and Renaissance artists imagined, because the bronze would have been impossibly heavy and its fall would have blocked the port. Scholars place it beside the harbor or on higher ground in the city, near the ancient acropolis or the site of the later Palace of the Grand Master. Today two columns topped by bronze deer guard the entrance of Mandraki Harbor, where many visitors assume it stood. The walled Medieval City of Rhodes, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1988, rises just behind.
In 305 and 304 BCE, the Macedonian general Demetrius Poliorcetes besieged Rhodes with enormous siege towers and failed. The Rhodians sold the equipment he left behind and used the money for the statue, which the sculptor Chares of Lindos built over about 12 years, finishing around 280 BCE, with an iron and stone frame inside a bronze skin. An earthquake toppled it around 226 BCE. Ptolemy III of Egypt offered to pay for rebuilding, but the Rhodians declined after an oracle warned against it. The pieces lay where they fell for some 800 years, and Pliny the Elder wrote that few people could wrap their arms around its thumb. Arab forces raided Rhodes in 653 CE and, by later accounts, sold the bronze for scrap.