The brazen statue of Helios, popularly called the Colossus, was seventy cubits in height; its gigantic size may be inferred from the fact that few could compass one of its thumbs with their arms.[12] Fifty-six years after its erection it was overthrown by an earthquake (circa B.C. 224), and as already related, the Rhodians would not attempt its restoration, though Ptolemæus offered them a contribution of 3000 talents, because prohibited by an oracle. And yet later authorities describe it as standing erect; and the Emperor Commodus, among his other extravagances, ordered his bust to be set upon its summit.
In 672 Rhodes was captured by the Saracens, and their leader, one of the lieutenants of Othman, sold the brass of which the famous statue was composed, to a Jewish merchant of Edessa, for a sum, it is said, of £36,000. The bargain must have been very profitable, if it be true that the materials thus acquired loaded a thousand camels.
A few words may be added in reference to the sculptor of the Colossus. According to Pliny, he was a pupil of Lysippus, a native of Lindos, and named Chares. Such, too, is the evidence of Strabo and the anonymous author of the Greek epigram. But in the writings of the Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus, we find the honour of the achievement ascribed to one Laches. According to Sextus, Chares, discovering that he was cheated of half the sum of money promised for the completion of the statue, killed himself in despair; and Laches, succeeding him, perfected the glorious work. The authority of Pliny and Strabo, however, seems to us preferable to that of Sextus: the Colossus was truly the work of Chares, alone and unaided, and to him belongs the glory of having, as Philo of Byzantium says, “Made a god like to a god, and endowed the world with a second sun.”
BOOK II.
THE SCIENCE OF LIGHTHOUSES.