Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts - Volume 6, Issue 4 – Pages 259-298

The Colossus of Rhodes: Its Height and Pedestal

Robert B. Kebric*

This is one of several interrelated articles on the Colossus of Rhodes submitted to ATINER journals.
No conclusive literary or archaeological evidence exists to demonstrate the exact height (or
configuration) of the Colossus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, or the nature of any
pedestal on which the giant statue, the largest in the Greek world, was mounted. This study gathers
together for the first time all the relevant ancient and modern evidence concerning these questions,
offering fresh interpretations of the material and determining that the Colossus was at least 110 feet
tall and stood on a three-tiered pedestal some fifty feet high-- a combined height of 160 feet. A related
study printed in another ATINER journal on the Colossus’ location, places the statue, a votive
offering to Helios, God of the Sun and the island’s patron deity, at the apex of the acropolis of
Rhodes city among the island’s other most sacred temples and monuments atop what is today
known as Monte Smith. The latter, approaching a height of about 300 feet in antiquity, would have
elevated the Colossus some 460 feet above the sea below and also made it an ideal light tower for
vessels approaching and leaving Rhodes’ five harbors. A number of photographs and illustrations
complement the inquiry.

In another study, 1 I concluded that the best location for the Colossus of
Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was atop the sacred
apex of the ancient Rhodian Acropolis on what is today known as Monte Smith.
This inquiry reinforces that conclusion, but it is concerned primarily with the
height of the Colossus and the pedestal on which it stood. While no exact figures
are possible since nothing of the giant votive offering to Helios, patron deity of
the island of Rhodes, remains, the most useful working numbers to be drawn
from available evidence are a height for the statue of the Colossus of
approximately 110 feet, and fifty feet for its pedestal: a total of 160 feet. When
combined with an elevation of close to 300 feet for Monte Smith (which can only
be approximated for ancient times), the Colossus in its entirety would probably
have towered some 460 feet about sea level.

*Senior Professor of History (Retired), University of Louisville, USA.

1. Robert B. Kebric, ‚Lighting the Colossus of Rhodes: A Beacon by Day and Night,‛
Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies 5, no.1 (January 2019): 11-31, https://www.athens
journals.gr/mediterranean/2019-5-1-2-Kebric.pdf; and Robert B. Kebric, ‚The Colossus of
Rhodes: Some Observations about Its Location,‛ Athens Journal of History (forthcoming),
2019.

https://doi.org/10.30958/ajha.6-4-1 doi=10.30958/ajha.6-4-1
Vol. 6, No. 4 Kebric: The Colossus of Rhodes: Its Height and Pedestal

Part I: The Statue

Because of the various ideas about the height of the Colossus of Rhodes
statue, most differing by only a few feet, this study will use the figure of 110 feet
as a reasonable common denominator. This is slightly higher than most modern
translations of figures given by Philo, Strabo, and Pliny (see below), the only
remaining ancient sources on the subject, who all provide a similar height for the
Colossus, standardized as 70 cubits. Likewise, the equivalent of that measure in
modern terms has usually been 105 feet— based on an 18-inch cubit. However,
standardization does not mean accuracy (see Figure 1 below), and, as others have
previously noted, 2 the actual height of the Colossus was probably higher.
Nonetheless, 110 feet is a reasonable mean measure to use for the statue here, and
it has also been used in other studies.

Figure 1. This “template” of human measurements from an actual building site in

Ancient Greece is one of the few in existence today. It clearly demonstrates the “personal”
quality of measurements for each project, probably including the Colossus-- and why,
despite modern statements about standardization of measurements in ancient societies, it
is impossible to calculate the latter’s height accurately. Those for the Colossus may have
been based on the physical characteristics of its sculptor, Chares, himself. The stone’s
figures are reproduced more clearly in the second graph (Archaeological Museum, Piraeus)

(a) Philo

2. Herbert Maryon, ‚The Colossus of Rhodes,‛ The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 76
(1956): 73, for example, makes it ‚a little over 120 feet.‛ See, also, e.g., Reynold Higgins,
‚The Colossus of Rhodes,‛ in The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, eds. Peter A Clayton
& Martin Price (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1993), 130; cf., further, a listing of different
heights in Matthew W. Dickie, ‚What Is a Kolossos and How Were Kolossoi Made in the
Hellenistic Period?‛, Greek Roman & Byzantine Studies (GRBS), vol. 37 (1996): 237-257, note
42, https://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/2801/5855.

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Philo of Byzantium, certainly to be identified with the third century B.C.

writer of engineering treatises, was the earliest of the three sources for the
Colossus’ height. He would have been alive at the time the giant statue was
standing. Philo includes it as one of the ‚Wonders‛ in his widely-known De
septem orbis spectaculis (4.1-6) and would not otherwise have mentioned it had it
already fallen. He came to work at Alexandria in Egypt, and was active there
during the last third of the third century B.C.3
While Philo could not have had any first-hand knowledge about the
Colossus’s construction, he certainly, judging from his close relations with
Rhodes, must have seen it before it fell in an earthquake around 226 B.C. Philo’s
introduction to his essay on the ‚Wonders‛, so very brief for all the attention it
has received, clearly implies that he had seen it when he writes (presumably
including himself) that, only a ‚few have seen all of them for themselves.‛4 If he
had not seen it but was, nonetheless, offering himself as an authority, he certainly
expected his readers to be a tolerant lot-- willing to accept detailed descriptions
from someone who knew little more, if any, than they did about the subject. It
would also be difficult to understand why he would bother to take up the quill,
busy as he was otherwise, to pen a work about spectacles had he not seen them
all, himself, and wished to convey his own sense of wonder to a mixed audience
that had little to no chance of ever seeing them. Clearly, he had been inspired to
write.
Once published, Philo’s booklet-- certainly inferior to his technical manuals,
but not outside the interests he expresses in them-- became very popular and was
often reproduced (no doubt, not always accurately). Living at Alexandria while
people, like himself (many with families), were coming to the new capital from
elsewhere in the Mediterranean, Philo simply may have wanted his pamphlet to
be something of an armchair tourist brochure. It certainly has the tone of such.
Through his descriptions, he could provide a literary treat for the mind. Perhaps
he could help the recent arrivals adjust to their new environment by letting them
know they were not as isolated as they might have first thought, and that there
were amazing sights to see-- some close by, like the pyramids; others further
afield at Rhodes, Halicarnassus, and Ephesus. Many new Alexandrians had
undoubtedly come from the Greek peninsula and might already have seen
Phidias’ famous statue of Zeus; but probably only a few, many former soldiers,
had ventured as far as the interior of the old Persian empire to Babylon— drawn
there by their professions or by the many stories now circulating about Alexander

3. For Philo’s date and his association with, and presence on, Rhodes, see E.W.
Marsden’s convincing study, Greek and Roman Artillery: Technical Treatises (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1969; reprint, 1999), 7-9, 109 and note 8; cf., also, John & Elizabeth Romer,
The Seven Wonders of the World: A History of the Modern Imagination (London: Seven Dials,
Cassell & Co., 1995), 25-47, especially p. 36.
4. See Hugh Johnstone’s translation in John and Elizabeth Romer, The Seven Wonders of
the World: A History of the Modern Imagination (London: Seven Dials, Cassell & Co., 1995), 230.

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the Great, their city’s namesake, and by the fact Babylon was once the repository
for his body. In fact, as previous studies have already noted, all of the Seven
Wonders can be related in some way to Alexander. Interestingly, Philo does not
include the Pharos at Alexandria in his list. Perhaps it was not fully complete at
the time, or was not yet considered comparable with the others. Maybe it was
because Philo thought there was no need to mention a local landmark that
everyone could already see towering over the harbor at Alexandria.
The most realistic reason that Philo omitted the Pharos in his list of
‚Wonders‛ was that considering the state of ‚lighthouses‛ at the time the Pharos
was built, most were little more than elevated platforms on which fires were
placed to help guide mariners into port. Despite the fact that this was Alexandria,
destined to become the greatest city in the Mediterranean world, in Philo’s day it
was still in a state of development. We are always in the habit of judging things
from later images of what they looked like, and the same is undoubtedly true for
the Pharos lighthouse. What it looked like when first built is unknown, but it
certainly was not as grand as later illustrations make it to be— nor what modern
romantic notions convey about its grandeur. The first meaningful insights about
its appearance do not come until the Roman imperial period, beginning with the
emperor, Domitian, when coins issued from the Alexandria mint depict it.
Perhaps by deconstructing later Arabic descriptions of its ruins, we can surmise
that it first was circular in shape before stronger outside walls encased it, and two
more tiers raised its height to over 400 feet. It certainly was not so grand in Philo’s
time, probably just a more elaborate tower with a flaming beacon on top, as the
contemporary Alexandrian epigrammatist, Posidippus, describes5 —perhaps not
yet worthy of ‚Wonder‛ recognition.
To complete his own list of ‚Seven,‛ Philo included the walls of Babylon and
the Hanging Gardens at Babylon. Philo’s living in the third century B.C., would
assure the tradition that the Gardens did exist, and from what he describes, he
had probably seen them, himself. However, it is odd that Philo gives no specific
location for them in his work. It has always been assumed that they were in
Babylon, but Philo does not say exactly where. No trace of the Hanging Gardens
has been found among the ancient ruins of Babylon, leading some to suggest that
they existed elsewhere-- but courses of rivers change, flooding some areas and/or
leaving others to decay; natural disasters cover or alter what was once perfectly
clear; systematic, purposeful total destruction can occur; deterioration through
neglect can, too; and there could be other reasons that the site of the Gardens has
not yet been discovered. There are, after all, no traces of the Colossus of Rhodes.
The Gardens may have been so famous that Philo did not feel he needed to
give more specific information. Everyone knew where they were. He would have

5. A.S.F. Gow and D.L. Page, The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams, (Cambridge:
University Press, 1965), 11; C. Austin and G. Bastianini, Posidippi Pellaei Quae Supersunt
Omnia (Milan: LED, Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, 2002), 115.

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known they were more than just some lingering romantic tradition. The Gardens
were far more likely to have been located in Babylon than at the earlier Assyrian
capital of Nineveh, as some have suggested. They would have attracted much
less attention had they been anywhere else, ‚in so far as other sights,‛ Philo
relates, ‚can be seen just as much as these, but the admiration provoked for the
Seven Wonders and for other sights is different.‛6 Babylon was not Nineveh. It
was Alexander’s old capital— at which his body had lain for some time after his
death, most assuredly, in a place equal to the man, himself. Such a place was
within the grounds of the Hanging Gardens.
While at Alexandria, Philo also states that he frequently engaged in personal
consultations with his counterparts on Rhodes. In his Belopoeica (51.10), he says,

We shall recount to you exactly what we discovered at Alexandria though much

association with the craftsmen engaged in such matters and through intercourse
with many master craftsmen in Rhodes, from whom we understood that the most
efficient engines more or less conformed to the method we are about to describe.
(Translation by Marsden)7

This passage clearly indicates Philo’s interest in what went on at Rhodes, one
that was also shared by the Ptolemies who ruled Hellenistic Egypt. Ptolemy I is
thought to have earned his epithet ‚Soter‛ from his rescue of Rhodes during its
siege by Demetrius Poliorcetes-- the event that led to the building of the Colossus
as a votive offering to Helios, the island’s patron god. Some decades later, the
most generous offer made by Ptolemy IV to rebuild the giant statue after its
collapse in an earthquake around 226 B.C. reaffirmed Ptolemaic desire to remain
involved at Rhodes. Since Philo, a technological expert, was living in Alexandria
at the time, he may even have been dispatched as part of a team to make a
preliminary survey of the damage before Ptolemy IV made his offer. If so,
nothing ever came of it.
Because Philo was not old enough to have any personal knowledge about
how the Colossus was built, what he did write could only have been speculative--
based on what he, himself, saw, and what sources at Rhodes told him long after it
had been completed. He did pose some questions about the Colossus in his small
essay, but they are concerned more with its interior iron framework, which
would have been completely covered at the time it was standing. It is not our
interest, however, to enter into the drawn-out discussion over how the great
statue was constructed--- although some pertinent details relating to Philo are not
without interest.
While Philo’s training was in applied mechanics—not colossal statues—he
does show an interest in sculpture. At the beginning of his Belopoeica (50.5), he
includes a comment that the renowned fifth century bronze sculptor, Polyclitus,

6. Johnstone’s translation, in Romer, Seven Wonders, 230.

7. Marsden, Artillery, 109.

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had made about his own work: ‚that perfection was achieved gradually in the
course of many calculations.‛ Otherwise, careless small discrepancies could result
in ‚a large total error at the end.‛ Repeating Polyclitus’ caution is clear indication
of Philo’s meticulousness in executing his own projects. He was not a careless
technician-- and another passage indicates his expert sense of proportion, which
also would have influenced his assessment of the Colossus:

For instance, the correct proportions of buildings could not possibly have been
determined right from the start and without the benefit of previous experience, as
is clear from the fact that the old builders were extremely unskillful, not only in
general building, but also in shaping the individual parts. The progress to proper
building was not the result of one chance experiment. Some of the individual
parts, which were equally thick and straight, seemed not to be so, because the
sight is deceived in such objects, taking no account of perspective. By
experimentally adding to the bulk here and subtracting there, by tapering, and by
conducting every possible test, they made them appear regular to the sight and
quite symmetrical, for this was the aim in that craft. (Marsden) 8

These observations about building houses, including proportion and

perspective, are not entirely out of character with the analysis we find in Philo’s
account of the Colossus. The problem in the latter case, however— besides its
brevity-- was that while Philo could admire the Colossus’ Polyclitan ‚perfection‛
in form, he lived too long after its completion to know all ‚the many calculations‛
(literally and figuratively) that Chares of Lindos, builder of the Colossus, had
been compelled to make during its actual construction. A similar problem had
faced the creator of the Statue of Liberty, which is often compared to the Colossus
of Rhodes. What had appeared perfectly acceptable to French sculptor, Auguste
Bartholdi, when working with small scale models of the Liberty, did not work at
full scale, and ‚each time the form was blown up visual corrections had to be
made to compensate for the new effects of the old form at greatly enlarged
scale— decisions that could only be entrusted to the sculptor himself.‛9 In his day,
Chares would have experienced the same problem, and much of what he did ‚on
the spot‛ was not recoverable. Even if it were, it was not preserved— an
unfortunate fact of life during Philo’s time that probably happened frequently
and is clearly demonstrated elsewhere in his own work: When attempting to
reproduce a ‚bronze-spring engine‛ invented by his immediate predecessor at
Alexandria, Ctesibius, Philo discovered that ‚the constructional details had
not been passed on‛ (67.25)--- lost even to ‚some of those who watched him
*Ctesibius+ inquisitively.‛ The example does not say much for the continuity
we might expect to find in the workshops of even the old masters. Undaunted,
Philo and his colleagues determined not to lose the technology of a machine of

8. Ibid., 109.
9. Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty, (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 119.

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such ‚excellence.‛ They followed Ctesibius’ original design as far as they were
able and augmented it with their own ideas about how to make it work. The
result, according to Philo, was an engine somewhat different in design, but
just as effective as (or better than) Ctesibius’ original.
Surely, when Philo was trying to reconstruct just how Chares had proceeded
in building the Colossus, he would have been confronted with the same kind
of ‚lost‛ constructional details. Over the twelve-year period it reportedly took
to finish the statue, there must have been many things forgotten a half century
later. Philo would have followed the same procedure he describes that he had
done with Ctesibius’ engine— following Chares’ design as best he could, and
then augmenting it with his own ideas. It was also Philo’s practice to construct
small-scale models, the measurements of which were then converted proportion-
nately to the final working product (55.10ff.). One would think he would have
applied the same methodology to his understanding of how Chares, who also
based his finished work on small-scale models, had gone about constructing
his Colossus.
Working from such models to construct colossal statues continued in Pliny’s
day. The latter provides some interesting information about one such model
used by Zenodorus for Nero’s Colossus at Rome. Pliny (d.79 A.D.) even says he
had seen the model in Zenodorus’ studio, ‚not only to admire the remarkable
likeness of the clay model but also to marvel as the frame of quite small timbers
which constituted the first stage of the work put in hand‛ (34.18.45-46). 10 Pliny
also says that the statue, (presuming still speaking of Nero’s Colossus) showed
how much the skill in bronze-founding had disappeared by his time, and seems
to be saying that while Zenodorus was no less an artist than any of the old
masters, that lack of knowledge caused him some hardship in completing his
colossus— Nero was even ready to provide gold and silver, presumably in bulk
form, to help complete the statue’s outer skin.
It is not entirely clear what Pliny is saying here. If the old skill of bronze-
founding had been lost and even metals like gold and silver were being offered
by the emperor to complete it, of what was Nero’s Colossus ultimately made?
It has become regular practice to say it was ‚bronze,‛ but perhaps this idea,
reinforced by Fred Albertson’s 2001 study,11 needs further review. What Pliny
appears to be saying is that Zenodorus, a craftsman equal to past great ones, had
to struggle to produce his colossal figures in the first century A.D., because the art
of working in bronze had so deteriorated. In other words, the comments of Pliny,
which Albertson apparently believes confirm Nero’s Colossus was made of

10 . Pliny, Natural History, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Loeb Classical Library,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952; Reprint, 1995).
11. Fred C. Albertson, ‚Zenodorus’s ‘Colossus of Nero,’‛ in Memoirs of the American
Academy in Rome, vol. 46, ed. Anthony Corbeill (The University of Michigan Press, 2001),
95-118.

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bronze,12 appear to be saying the exact opposite. For now, perhaps, a less definitive
term, like ‚copper alloy,‛ might be a better description for Nero’s Colossus.
Albertson’s work is otherwise very useful for his discussion of Philo, the Colossus
of Rhodes, and other relevant information, and all we can say is that Pliny’s
comments about the deterioration of bronze-working definitely affirm that the old
way, the one used by Chares’ to construct his bronze Colossus, had been lost.
A comment Pliny made in the same discussion about Zenodorus—
regarding an earlier colossal statue of Mercury the latter had fashioned in Gaul,
that took ten years to complete— does have immediate application, because it is
useful as a comparison to the one Pliny made about Chares taking twelve years
(34.18.41) to complete his Colossus of Rhodes. If correct, it demonstrates just how
long these giant works took to complete.
Ultimately, what Philo did write in his brief analysis about how Chares
proceeded in building the Colossus of Rhodes, probably seemed workable to him;
but, unlike in the case of his artillery models, the scale of the Colossus far exceeded
anything in Philo’s own experience-- he had no way of knowing whether or not he
had correctly understood. Philo, of course, did not need to, because, unlike with
the precise engines whose effectiveness he had to prove to members of his
profession (and his patrons), he did not have to build a Colossus. His De septem
was not a technical manual but an uncomplicated piece, probably turned out in his
leisure and meant to entertain a wide audience-- and what he had come up with in
his recap of the Colossus’ construction only needed to have the ‚feel‛ of the real
thing. He simply did not know if (and could not prove) what he described would
actually work, and no one was going to build another colossus based on his
musings. He, himself, was aware that his explanations were not always easy for
others to grasp, observing in his description of another, unrelated, mechanical
engine that, ‚Perhaps what we have said appears incredible to you, as it has to
many others‛ (70.35). Three centuries later, Zenodorus, it appears, was in a
position not unlike that of Philo when he was attempting to build his own colossus
without a proper ‚blueprint.‛ No one seems to have understood the process of the
building of the Colossus of Rhodes exactly, and the recurring problems faced by
later sculptors might at least lead us to view whatever detractors have said about
Philo’s comments in a more sympathetic light.
As for how close Philo ever got to seeing the Colossus while it was still
standing is another question. If, as we assert, it stood atop Monte Smith at the
summit of the Rhodian acropolis, access may have been restricted-- as was typical
for sacred structures and votive offerings. This was a particularly large one, and
caution, alone, would probably also dictate how far anyone without authorization
could approach (especially if it were also a working lighthouse). Weather
conditions could also be a problem. The Colossus most likely was within an
enclosed precinct, so perhaps the best view of it— one that would also display it

12. Ibid., 97.

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in all its glory rising above everything else-- was from a distance. Nonetheless,
since Philo was so well known among colleagues at Rhodes, he may have been
allowed closer access, which might have provided some additional hints about
how it had been constructed. He was certainly privy to some tradition about it—
but, a half century after its construction, anyone of importance who might have
provided more definitive answers was dead. The best he came away with was
what had become the prevailing tradition among the Rhodians, packed with
remembrances of what individuals had been ‚told by their fathers‛ --and
whatever else Philo might have ascertained by his own observations.
Ultimately, the Romers13 have summed up the problems relating to exactly
how the Colossus was constructed most sensibly:

The most important thing, however, is that there is no need to imagine that Chares
used a single method of construction for his statue<It is difficult to imagine that
Chares’ Colossus did not also have different parts of it made in different ways; a
colossal brazen statue such as the world had never seen, held together with good
craftsmanship and with experience that reached back for millennia to the beginnings
of history.

It is the height of the Colossus, not its construction method (which we leave
to those like Ursula Vedder in her 2015 summary, ‚Was the Colossus of Rhodes
Cast in Courses or in Large Sections?‛14) that most concerns us here (although
Vedder does go as high as 114 feet). Curiously, while we today would think
anyone would first be attracted by the Colossus’ height, Philo does not seem
overly interested about how tall it was. In fact, he mentions it only in passing and
seems more intent on confirming that the giant statue did, indeed, represent
Helios-- and in the amount of bronze used in its construction. After it had fallen,
he and other interested visitors may have been able to see it closer as it lay on the
ground-- viewing, as Pliny later described, some of its pieces and inner structure.
By that time, however, Philo’s pamphlet on the ‚Wonders‛ had itself already
become a piece of literary history, reaffirming the fame of the once great Colossus
and apparently encouraging enough readers to travel great distances just to see
the huge pile of rubble it had now become-- ‚sacred‛ as it might still be. Pliny
confirms that they did.
Philo’s booklet became the ancient version of the modern ‚bucket list‛ of
must-sees for many travelers. Both Strabo and Pliny later agree with him about
the Colossus’ height, but neither mention Philo by name. That might at first seem

13. Romer, Seven Wonders, 39.

14. Ursula Vedder, ‚Was the Colossus of Rhodes Cast in Courses or in Large
Sections?‛ in Artistry in Bronze: The Greeks and Their Legacy: XIX International Congress on
Ancient Bronzes, eds. Jens M. Daehner et.al. (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum and
the Getty Conservation Institute, 2017), 21-27, http://www.getty.edu/publications/arti
stryinbronze/downloads/DaehnerLapatinSpinelli_ArtistryinBronze.pdf.

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an important omission, but there really was no reason why either would have
mentioned him since neither’s comments were focused primarily on the giant
statue. They certainly had read other accounts from authors, whom they also do
not cite. By their times, the Colossus was only an interesting memory, and for
Pliny’s Roman audience, at least, the colossal statue (formerly) of Nero (18.45-46)
was now the ‚big thing‛ attracting people’s attention. The Colossus of Rhodes’
once impressive height had probably become little more than a listing in an
ancient equivalent of a ‚Facts on File,‛ an arcane statistic educated persons of the
day could cite at random—or use in satire, as Lucian did. Nonetheless, as our
most contemporary reporter, Philo’s statement that the Colossus was 70 cubits
tall, equated here to 110 feet, is probably as definitive a measure as we are ever
going to get.

(b) Strabo

Strabo (c. 64 B.C.- after 21 A.D.) gave his source of information for the 70
cubit height of the Colossus as the ‚author of an iambic verse,‛ an obscure
reference suggesting to many that it came from the original dedication on the
Colossus.15 Considering Strabo’s interests and opportunities to do so, there is no
reason to believe that he had not seen the remains of the Colossus. He was from
that part of the world, having been born in Pontus on the southern shore of the
Black Sea. He also says (2.5.11) that he had traveled widely and that no one who
had written geography had journeyed over a wider extent of countries than he
had. Because Strabo spent an extended stay in Egypt (as Philo had done earlier), it
is likely he would have traveled through Rhodes to get to Alexandria. Perhaps he
had also done so as a stop on one of his visits to Rome. He did know that when
one arrived by sea at Rhodes City, it is in a harbor on the eastern side, which
likely comes from his personal knowledge. Whatever the case, his many travels
certainly would have taken him to Rhodes, probably several times, which he
thoroughly describes in his Geography.16
Two other items are revealing in respect to Strabo’s presence at Rhodes. As a
youth, he studied under Aristodemus of Nysa (14.1.48), who, at the time, Strabo
says, was ‚in his extreme old age.‛ Strabo had his ‚entire course‛ with
Aristodemus at Nysa-- but also mentions that ‚my teacher‛ had another school at
Rhodes and traveled between the two. Because he indicates a long tenure with

15. Cf. Dickie, What Is a Kolossos and How Were Kolossoi Made in the Hellenistic
Period, 253; also, Alexander Dale, ‚Lyric Epigrams in Meleager’s Garland, the Anthologia
Palatina, and the Anthologia Planudea,‛ Greek Roman & Byzantine Studies (GRBS), no. 50
(2010): note 53, https://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/1461/1551.
16 . Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, ed. and trans. Leonard Horace Jones (Loeb
Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). https://archive.org/
details/Strabo08Geography17AndIndex.

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Aristodemus-- and the latter would have to have traveled to Rhodes to teach at
regular intervals if he wished to keep any students-- Strabo would necessarily
have to have accompanied the old man. Otherwise, it would have been his own
education that would suffer. It was also not unusual for such extended
relationships between student and teacher to become more personal and
reciprocal. There are a number of examples, especially from Roman times (e.g.
Brutus), wherein teachers became life-long friends and advisors to former
students-- and, because Aristodemus was so old, the companionship of a bright,
young pupil like Strabo at both Nysa and Rhodes would have provided welcome
comfort and support.
Strabo’s statement at the beginning of his Geography (1.1.23) about how
readers should judge the merits of his work is also interesting. He says they
should look at it as they would the completed colossal works of a sculptor-- and
not decide its worth from a minute inspection of random parts of the narrative.
They should ‚look principally for perfection‛ in the whole of his Geography, the
proportions of which most readers would agree were colossal. Strabo’s
comparison of his work to a colossal statue is a striking parallel by itself,
especially from one who was not a sculptor but a geographer-- but his ‚whole
instead of the parts‛ analogy is incredibly close to what one might expect from an
individual who had actually seen the pieces of the Colossus of Rhodes, the
greatest colossal statue of its time, lying scattered imperfectly on the ground.
Perhaps as a boy, Strabo had heard nothing but positive things about the beauty
of the Colossus— but after seeing it fallen in pieces, it no longer exhibited the
‚perfection‛ it once did as a whole. A passage from Lucian may help recapture
something about how Strabo may earlier have felt about the great statue. The
second century A.D. Roman satirist has the Colossus, himself, tell Zeus,
‚Rhodes<decided to make me on this enormous overblown scale,‛ but, ‚in spite
of my size, I’m very well done; I have artistic quality.‛17 The fallen colossus no
longer had ‚artistic quality.‛
Strabo may have been so discouraged when he first saw the scattered
remains of the once glorious statue that he remembered the unhappy moment,
later employing it as an analogy for readers of his own Geography: Do not look at
the pieces but always view a work in its entirety. It may also have been on an
early visit to Rhodes that Strabo first learned of the dedicatory verse that had
mentioned the statue’s impressive height of near 110 feet.

(c) Pliny the Elder

Whether or not Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.) had actually been to Rhodes and
seen the remains of the Colossus he describes cannot be known. It would

17. Lucian of Samosata, ‚Tragopodagra,‛ in Selected Satires of Lucian, ed. and trans.
Lionel Casson (New York: Norton Library, 1968), 11.

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certainly seem likely because of the scope of his curiosity (which contributed to
his death in the 79 A.D. eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, just a few years after he had
recorded his comments about the Colossus), and because of his official functions
as a Roman magistrate. The latter caused him to travel extensively, mostly in
Germany and Spain. His description of the pieces of the Colossus lying on the
ground (34.18.41), however, appears to have been derived from personal
conversations with-- or gleaned from the writings of-- a fellow magistrate, C.
Licinius Mucianus. Mucianus’ presence in the east allowed him access to the most
famous tourist attractions, a special interest of his, and there is probably no reason
to believe that Pliny did not base his comments about the Colossus and other
statuary on Rhodes (34.17.36) on Mucinaus’ observations. 18 Mucianus would,
therefore, most probably have been Pliny’s source for the Colossus’ height of 70
cubits.
In his description of the fallen giant, Pliny records that the Colossus’ fingers
were bigger than most statues, and its thumb (was there only one thumb
fashioned in the round— or that had survived?) was so large that most people
could not encircle it with their arms. He also states that there were huge cavities
in the Colossus’ torso, where limbs had broken off, and one could see the stones
inside that had been placed to steady the Colossus while it was standing. In his
description, Pliny has curiously overlooked the supports of the iron frame
interior, which, together with the stones, had helped hold the giant statue
together. The framework is one aspect of the statue’s complex inner construction
about which Philo is adamant in his discussion of the Colossus. Philo was an
accomplished engineer. Ironwork was a tradition on Rhodes (Strabo 14.2.7), and
Philo had been in the arsenals on Rhodes, where he had visited colleagues
working iron who knew of his interest in the Colossus. They would have passed
on to Philo whatever they knew about the tradition of the iron used in the statue’s
construction. It was something of which they would have been proud. Philo may
even have been allowed, as a professional courtesy, a look Inside the Colossus by
those who maintained its interior.19 In his brief discussion of the Colossus, Philo
leaves a description: ‚the horizontal bars exhibit hammer-work in the Cyclopean
fashion‛ and muses further, ‚What kind of fire-tongs were used, what size were

18. T.F. Caldwell’s very thorough recent Master’s Thesis states: ‚The fragments [in
Pliny+ relating to the island of Rhodes could be derived from Mucianus’ personal
investigations<.‛ However, Caldwell also cautions, ‚it is also possible that *Emperor+
Titus served as *Mucianus’+ source of information for the number of statues Rhodes<‛
*Thomas Francis Caldwell, ‚The Career of Licinius Mucianus,‛ (Master's Thesis,
University of Melbourne, 2015): 44. https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/
handle/11343/91093/Thomas_Caldwell_MA_Thesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y].
19. Just as my wife and I, by way of example, arrived unannounced some decades
ago at the newly-discovered and closed-to-the-public, Tomb of King Philip of Macedon at
Vergina, and were allowed the courtesy of an impromptu examination of the site by
Professor Andronikos’ thoughtful assistants.

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the bases of the anvils, with what workforce was such a width of poles forged?‛20
Yet, Pliny is silent about its interior framework of iron ‚poles‛ that Philo had
praised.
Some inside structure of iron poles or bars, as Philo noted, necessarily held
the stones in place: ‚The artist *Chares+ secured [the Colossus] from the inside
with iron frames and squared blocks of stone.‛ The latter could not have just been
stacked loosely inside, if for no other reason than Rhodes was in earthquake
country and the blocks would shift, possibly throwing the statue over. It is just
possible that during the fatal earthquake of c.226 B.C., a large number of stones
broke loose from the iron frame holding them and radically shifted the Colossus’
weight. The Colossus’ collapse would have been a singular event. Philo’s
description states that the stones were held in place—not loose-- and there is no
reason to doubt an expert engineer, so familiar with the building techniques of his
day.
Chares, too, already knew from his master Lysippus’ work that colossal
statues needed to be reinforced to protect them from natural threats (e.g. Pliny’s
remark *34.17.40+ about Lysippus’ 60-foot statue of Zeus at Tarentum, that was so
well-balanced it could not be dislodged, either by human or natural force). If for
no other reason, there would have to have been an iron frame inside the Colossus
to hold stones in place so that workmen could move freely about the statue’s
interior to service and repair it on a routine basis: Some remains of the iron
frame(s) should have been visible among the massive remains of stones. There is
no way to explain Pliny’s omission, although the reason for the missing iron may
be simple Rhodian economics. It could hardly have been ‚cost effective‛ to leave
the bronze pieces of the Colossus lying about, which the tradition, at least,
attributed to an oracular caution to leave the sacred bronze remains where they
fell. If that were indeed the explanation for why the bronze was not removed, it
may not have applied to the iron frame inside-- a utilitarian structure that had
never been visible from the outside, anyway, but was still worth a lot of money.
The value of so much ‚wasted‛ metal that could be ‚recycled‛ would have been
phenomenal. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the Rhodians did, indeed,
‚mine‛ the iron over the years through the openings in the colossal torso to use or
sell elsewhere.
If, as Pliny observes, the Colossus’ torso still laid virtually intact on the
ground with stones visible through large cavities in its body; and, if his failure to
mention any traces of the iron interior framework is an indication it had been
removed— then that would be a compelling sign that the ‚skin‛ of the torso had
been cast, as Philo suggests, rather than made from individual bronze ‚sheets.‛
Otherwise, the ‚corpse‛ of the Colossus, with little left of its interior frame to keep
its shape, would have collapsed in upon itself from its own weight while lying
centuries on the ground. It apparently did not.

20. Johnstone’s translation, in Romer, Seven Wonders, 232.

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Pliny leaves some detail that may be useful in reconstructing how the remains
of the fallen Colossus were laid out. It was a votive offering and its pieces still had
sacred significance, so it seems somewhat offensive that visitors were allowed to
satisfy their curiosity about parts of the statue in what would seem a rather
profane, ‚touristy‛ way. Perhaps to avoid what had undoubtedly become an
immediate nuisance for Rhodian authorities, a perimeter wall restricted access to
the main torso of the Colossus— a delineated sacred area, above which the gaping
holes and stones inside the giant statue could still be seen. One would also think
some such barrier would be necessary to prevent animals from seeking shelter in
the ruins. The damage caused by birds, always an architectural pest, mice (e.g.
Lucian’s satirical comment [Trag. 8] 21 about large statues supported inside by
wooden frames becoming home to hordes of mice), as well as insects over the
centuries can only be guessed-- and just maintaining the integrity of whatever
metal survived would have been a persistent problem. Allowing general access to
the entire remains could be very dangerous, and theft would also have been a
concern. Perhaps the thumb and a finger or two of the Colossus that Pliny
described were on display in an adjacent but separate area, where a few
interesting pieces from the Colossus were arranged. It would have been rather
difficult for visitors to try to place their arms completely around the giant thumb if
it were lying flat on the ground. If the pieces were mounted on raised supports
slightly above the ground, however, then at least the story becomes more credible.
The Statue of Liberty, which has frequently been compared with the Colossus
and whose designer, Auguste Bartholdi, had Chares’ ‚Wonder of the World‛ in
mind while fashioning it, may also be useful in helping determine something
about the Colossus’ size. While the height of the Statue of Liberty is routinely
given as 305 feet, the statistic always includes her pedestal. Liberty, herself, stands
only 151 feet, less than half that total-- and this measurement also includes the
torch rising high above her head. If she is measured only from heel to head top,
her height is reduced to 111 feet, about the same size as the Colossus. What is also
revealing is that Liberty’s index finger is just over 8 feet long, and the middle joint
of that same finger has a circumference of 3’ 6‛, which would compare favorably
with Pliny’s comments about the circumference of the Colossus’ thumb. Pliny
had also said that the Colossus’ fingers were taller than most statues— and most
of the statues about which he was speaking were probably in the 6-8-foot range.
While such comparisons are, of course, imprecise, it would still indicate that
the Colossus was on a scale close to that of the Statue of Liberty. No sculptor can
reproduce exactly the ‚perfection‛ of a small-scale clay model in a colossal statue
because alterations have to be made during the actual construction process. The
Liberty’s copper skin of 2.5 mm is, by most modern estimates, thicker than that of
the Colossus, which would complicate any estimates based on Pliny’s description
of the precise size Colossus’ thumb and fingers. Nonetheless, such comparisons

21. Lucian, Tragopodagra, 8.

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are valuable, and are at least helpful in confirming a height of well over 100 feet
for the Colossus.
The more pressing problem in attempting to determine the correct height for
the Colossus, however, is not so much with the ancient figures being incorrect, as
it is, as shown earlier, in the attempts to equate them with modern standards. By
way of example, the Romers’ essay on the Colossus renders Philo’s cubit
calculation for the Colossus’ height as 120 feet (although their statement that the
12-year project would have risen at a rate of 6-8 feet a year would seem to result
in a shorter Colossus).22 Varying ideas about what constituted a standard cubit in
antiquity-- whether it be the length from elbow to wrist, or forearm to the small or
middle finger (further complicated if an actual individual’s [perhaps Chares,
himself] body appendages were used) makes a precise calculation of the
Colossus’ height impossible.
There is also the added difficulty of not knowing whether the Colossus was
measured from the soles of its feet to its shoulder, to its hairline— or to the very
top of a radiant crown. So, too, it is also unclear whether either of the Colossus’
arms extended above its head— and, if so, was this included in the ancient
measurements. Nonetheless, when everything Philo, Strabo, and Pliny the Elder
said about the Colossus of Rhodes is considered, 110 feet remains the most useful
working number for its height. It certainly was no shorter.

Part II: The Pedestal of the Colossus

The height of any pedestal on which the Colossus once stood is nowhere so
specifically stated as it is for the statue-- but modern estimates are about fifty-feet
high, a height that would accommodate most of the problems associated with a
110-foot statue standing upon it. Philo is the only one of the three main sources
who mentions anything about a base for the Colossus, saying it was ‚A base of
white marble‛ and that ‚the soles of the *Colossus’+ feet on the base were already
at a greater height than other statues.‛23
Philo gives no dimensions for the base, but it was substantial enough to have
kept the Colossus’ giant feet anchored in place when the catastrophic earthquake
of c. 226 B.C. hit (by way of comparison, the Statue of Liberty’s feet are 25-feet
long). Since Strabo specifically states (14.2.5) that the huge statue broke at the
knees when it fell, that could have happened only if the feet remained firmly
attached, holding the Colossus in place up to its knees. It would also mean that
the ‚base‛ of which Philo speaks was substantial-- not just a larger version of the
standard slab or block plinth on which smaller statues were typically placed.
Internal supports of iron (and/or stone) would necessarily have to have run up

22. Romer, Seven Wonders, 36.

23. Johnstone’s translation, in Romer, Seven Wonders, 232.

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from a much larger and stronger pedestal below-- through the feet embedded in
the white marble plinth, and to the knees, where the strain became too great. At
that point, the adjoining independent metal framework (and stone reinforcement)
within the Colossus, that connected the larger upper part of the statue to the
lower supports at the knees, was not strong enough to keep it upright— and it
bent and fell.
Chares would have been fully aware that the Colossus could not be held in
place simply by embedding its feet in a larger version of a plinth— and the
system he ultimately designed had to have been technologically sound to keep
the statue upright. Earthquakes were, and still are, a fact of life at Rhodes. There
must have been a number that shook the island over the 66-year lifespan of the
Colossus, probably even while it was being constructed. That the Colossus
survived as long as it did in such an environment would demonstrate that Chares
had indeed employed— successfully so, until the fatal earthquake-- a system of
firm supports in an enormous pedestal on which the Colossus stood. There
would also have had to have been compensation for thermal and all other
atmospheric stresses, as, indeed, the engineers for the Statue of Liberty, including
the brilliant technician Gustave Eiffel who built the Eiffel Tower in Paris, had to
consider for the metal used in its construction.
Presumably, the Colossus would have continued to stand if not for its
weakness at the knees (a vulnerable pressure point for humans, as well). A lower
system of supports continued to hold the Colossus firmly in place, while what
proved to be the weaker upper internal frame did not. It is doubtful that this was
a design flaw. Chares would certainly have foreseen the problem area at the knees
and followed the practice of his mentor, Lysippus, who provided independent
support(s) for his own colossal statues (Pliny 34.17.40). The Colossus, however,
was almost twice the size of Lysippus’ tallest statue. Chares was moving into
unknown territory in respect to what could happen to such tall statues. He
probably believed that he had taken every engineering precaution— but an
earthquake of apparently unprecedented magnitude proved him wrong. What is
clear is that the Colossus would have to have had a huge masonry pedestal (with
a massive internal system of iron and stone anchors) to support it, and that
Philo’s reference to a white marble base in which the Colossus’ feet were
embedded is also accurate— but, structurally, what he described could only have
been the Colossus’ plinth and not its pedestal.
Some idea about the character of a pedestal for the Colossus has been
revealed in a recent study related to an ancient earthquake ‚technology‛ utilized
in buildings in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world. Earthquakes were
always on the mind of ancient engineers and the study published by A. Bayraktar

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et al.,24 presents evidence to show such technology at work in surviving ancient

structures from the same part of the world as Rhodes.
Whatever remains of these structures, some going back to the sixth century
B.C., their survival after so long a time in better-than-might-be-expected condition
appears to be the result of this technology. The study found consistent evidence
in a variety of buildings to show that ‚three layers of orthostat stone, with no
mortar between the layers, served to absorb earthquake waves, which are
concentrated at the primary time causing less movement to be transferred to the
superstructure.‛ This ‚seismic resistance method‛ of three stone layers with no
mortar, allowed the main earthquake shock waves to ‚play out‛ before hitting
the structure mounted on top of the platform and destroying it. This simple
technology appears to have become routinely employed in earthquake active
environments, and there is no reason to suppose that it would not have been used
in Chares’ design of the pedestal for the Colossus. Of course, if the ground in
front of the structure should shift or collapse, as the limestone cliff on which we
maintain the Colossus originally stood on Monte Smith shows evidence of having
done over the past centuries, nothing could prevent the statue from falling.
There is, then, enough conclusive evidence from structures contemporary
with the Colossus to propose that its pedestal, too, was composed of three un-
mortared tiers of stone, declining in size as they rose, as illustrated in the
accompanying Figure 2 below. This was accepted earthquake technology in
antiquity, and Chares and his engineers, some most assuredly from Egyptian
background, would have employed it in their planning for the Colossus. The Giza
Pyramids were also constructed mostly of layers of limestone blocks— with no
mortar. They have survived thousands of years of earth movements beneath
them.

24 . A. Bayraktar, H. Keypour, and A. Naderzadeh, ‚Application of Ancient

Earthquake Resistant Method in Modern Construction Technology,‛ in Proceedings of the
15 WCEEE, Lisbon (Portuguese Society of Seismic Engineering -SPES, 2012), 38: 30709-
30718, https://www.iitk.ac.in/nicee/wcee/article/WCEE2012_5773.pdf.

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Figure 2. A. Gabriel’s Earlier Reconstruction25 of the Building Process for the Colossus.
Few subsequent studies, if any, would agree with the posture of the Colossus, but, for
illustrative purposes, his acceptance of a three-tier pedestal of about 50 feet, including a
small base/plinth at the top like the one Philo described, is shown here. “Scaffolding” from
Demetrius’ Helepolis is also included in Gabriel’s concept (see the discussion below).

A three-tiered, fifty-foot high pedestal for the Colossus is not only contrary to
Philo’s previously discussed description for its base of white marble which we
have determined could only relate to a large marble plinth in which the Colossus
feet were embedded, but it is also controversial in another way. One would think
it compulsory to have employed Rhodes’ own native gray-blue marble, regularly
quarried at Lartos, near Lindos, in any votive offering dedicated to its patron
deity, Helios— this one for helping save the island from Demetrius’ siege. In fact,
one can imagine the citizenry’s outcry, particularly at Lartos, if it were learned
that white marble was being imported to use for the Colossus’ pedestal instead of
their island’s native marble-- especially since it was routinely used on the island
and widely exported, particularly for statue bases or pedestals. However, as
explained earlier, Philo’s ‚white marble base‛ can easily be reconciled if it were
actually the plinth-- which rested atop the Colossus’ much grander pedestal of

25. Albert Gabriel, ‚La Construction, L'Attitude et L'Emplacement du Colosse de

Rhodes (The Construction, Attitude and Location of the Colossus of Rhodes),‛ Bulletin de
Correspondance Hellénique, no. 56 (1932): 337.

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Rhodian gray-blue marble below. The famed Nike of Samothrace, now displayed
in the Louvre Museum in Paris, provides a convenient illustration.

(a) The Nike of Samothrace

As seen in Figures 3a and 3b below, the well-known Nike of Samothrace’s

oared, ship-shaped base (and the additional elongated platform on which the
latter sits) was made of Rhodian gray-blue marble. The marble was so well
known on Rhodes for statue work that Philo could not have been referring to the
Colossus’ major pedestal when he mentions the ‚base of white marble‛ on which
Chares ‚first set the feet of the Colossus up to the ankle-bones.‛ He can only be
alluding to the kind of white marble plinth, a large one in this case, that typically
held a Greek statue’s feet in place-- oftentimes resting on a larger pedestal
beneath it. There are many surviving examples of ancient statues bases at Rhodes
and elsewhere in which the imprints of the feet where full-size figures once stood
are still fully visible.

Figure 3a. The Nike of Samothrace. We use it here only as an illustration for a base of
Rhodian gray-blue marble to show what its color would have looked like if it formed the
marble pedestal for the Colossus-- and, also, as an illustration of a “white base” on which
the Nike immediately stands. The base is a modern addition, designed to elevate the statue
for viewing purposes at the Louvre, but it is included to help visualize how the much
grander white marble base for the Colossus may have appeared. This arrangement of
statue, small white marble plinth, and grander Lartos marble pedestal is probably similar
to what Philo was describing for the Colossus. See, also, Figure 3b

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Figure 3b. The white stone base, presumably marble, added by the Louvre staff for
displaying the Nike of Samothrace atop the impressive Daru Staircase. Philo was
probably speaking of something like this on a larger scale when he described “A base of
white marble” in which the Colossus feet were embedded. It would have then rested on
a significantly larger Rhodian gray-blue marble pedestal below it

If Chares had not constructed the actual pedestal for the Colossus out of
the native gray-blue marble, Helios’ own unique stone (or at least faced the
pedestal’s exterior with it), not only would he have been insulting the island’s
inhabitants, but also the sun-god, himself, the patron of Rhodes, whose statue
he was building. The contemporary Alexandrian epigrammatist, Posidippus,
when speaking about the Colossus (AB 68), notes that the Rhodians were not
satisfied with the height of Chares’ giant statue and wanted him to make it
twice as big. One can only imagine how they would have reacted if they
learned that their own sculptor was purposely eschewing their native gray-
blue Lartos marble to build the pedestal for his Colossus in favor of generic
white marble from elsewhere. The pedestal must, necessarily, have been made
of Lartos marble.
There are sometimes white veins in Lartos marble, but it would have been a
painstakingly difficult process to mine enough of it to provide a fifty-foot high
‚white‛ pedestal for the Colossus— if only for its facing. The only plausible
interpretation for what Philo meant when he said, ‚A base of white marble was
laid down,‛ is that he was referring to a version of a standard-sized plinth that
was enlarged proportionately to secure the Colossus’ large feet. By way of
comparison, the Statue of Liberty’s feet, each 25-feet long, also stand on a separate
‚plinth‛ resting atop the 40 x 40-foot apex of a much larger pedestal below. What
Philo described in his account of the Colossus was a white marble plinth-- on top

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of a fifty-foot, three-tiered pedestal of Lartos marble--- in which the Colossus’

feet were embedded (as shown above in Figure 2).
The Colossus on its smaller white marble plinth interested Philo; the larger
pedestal below did not. The latter was strictly utilitarian, a necessary but
subordinate adjunct to the statue that formed no part of its artistic unity. To quote
Marvin Trachtenberg in his Statue of Liberty, ‚Functionally, a pedestal is analogous
to a picture frame: it isolates a work both physically and symbolically.‛26 That
does not mean that a pedestal cannot be decorative-- but, if it is, it cannot detract
from what is ultimately displayed upon it. What caught Philo’s eye stopped at the
bottom of the white marble plinth which was still a part of the Colossus’ artistic
unity, reemphasizing his own sculptor’s instincts in perspective and proportion.
Today, people do not go to the Statue of Liberty to marvel at its 89-foot stone
pedestal (and the 65-foot foundation it rests on). Liberty’s pedestal is attractive as
well as functional— but it is still only there to support and display the famous
statue above it, which people do come to see. At night, it is Liberty-- not her
pedestal-- that is fully illuminated.
Visually, how the Colossus was situated may ultimately have called to mind
something like how the great quadriga of the nearby Mausoleum of Halicarnassus,
another of the Seven Wonders, was displayed on a low ‚pedestal‛ set over a
truncated pyramid below.27 Chares’ white marble plinth for the Colossus was
large enough to be noticed but small enough not to cause distraction or local
controversy. The same enlarged white marble plinth would have provided a nice
visual contrast between the shining colossal bronze statue above it and the gray-
blue pedestal below, faced with, or fully built of, the prized Rhodian marble.
The Nike of Samothrace is a useful example for this kind of visual contrast.
Described as a ‚colossal work‛ in the Louvre Museum’s own description of the
famous Hellenistic statue, the Nike stands 18’ 3‛ atop a ship whose keel rests on
its original flat, elongated base. The Nike, herself, is nine feet tall. Although
heavily restored, it is the closest surviving sculpture we have to compare to the
points we are making here: It is a ‚colossal‛ statue; gray-blue marble from Lartos,
Rhodes, was used to make the ship-shaped pedestal on which Nike alights; and,
while some believe the Nike portion of the sculpture may have been fashioned
elsewhere, most consider the monument originally to have been an ex-voto
offering by the people of Rhodes to commemorate an important naval victory in
the early second century B.C. The statue also has a small white stone block upon
which Nike stands, appearing to defy the strong winds blowing against her
(always a threat to large statues like the Colossus) as she alights on the deck,
separating her from the ship and providing a dramatic contrast. All these things
are illustrated in the photos above.

26. Trachtenberg, Liberty, 151.

27. Ibid., 155.

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The white stone (presumably marble) base of the Nike of Samothrace is,
however, a modern addition, placed there by the Louvre staff in 1934 to display
the Nike, now at the top of the Grand Daru Staircase, to its full advantage. We are,
nonetheless, using it here for illustrative purposes, because it clearly demonstrates
the marked contrast the addition of the white base has made between the statue
of Nike and the original gray-blue Rhodian marble of the ship below it. While not
the sculptor’s original intent, the Museum’s ‚addition‛ probably followed as
closely as possible what he would have done if faced with their problem in
displaying it. If the white stone base had not been added by the Louvre, the
bottom part of Nike, mounted at the top of the Staircase, would have been
obscured to viewers. Positioning is always crucial to best show off a piece of
sculpture.
Although altered for practical purposes, the Nike of Samothrace, still provides
a striking visual representation of what Philo probably saw when he made his
comment about the Colossus: A huge statue, whose feet were set on a small white
plinth of marble which rested directly on (and was secured to) a much larger
pedestal of Rhodian gray-blue marble. Using a little imagination, the Nike can
also illustrate what impact the white marble addition would have if she were
descending on what was only a generic, functional large pedestal of gray-white
marble instead of the more interesting ship-shaped one. No one would even have
noticed it because it would have had no role in the artistic unity of the piece. The
viewer’s eye would have been concentrated entirely on Nike, and, unavoidably,
the white base on which her feet were inevitably alighting. That is how we
suggest that Philo viewed the bronze Colossus of Rhodes, standing on the white
marble base he describes. Coins that depict another colossal statue, this one of
Apollo at Apollonia Pontica, 28 show him standing on what appears to be
something close to the kind of ‚base,‛ or plinth, on which Philo said the Colossus
stood and whose large feet were embedded (Figure 4). It also matches very well
with the white stone base on which the Nike of Samothrace was set by modern
restorers. For the Colossus, the ‚white marble base‛ would have been situated at
the top of a fifty-foot pedestal.

28. Coins minted at Apollonia Pontica show full standing, frontal representations of
their colossal statue of Apollo-- considerably shorter than the Colossus of Rhodes at 45-
feet and some two centuries earlier. They provide a splendid illustration of what the statue
looked like standing on what is probably the same kind of ‚base of white marble‛ Philo
had described for the Colossus. Specific photos of the coins (Stavri Topalov) may be
viewed on-line, at, Ivan Dikov, ‚Bulgaria’s Sozopol to Restore Ancient Statue of Apollo,
‘Colossus of Apollonia Pontica’, Not Unlike Greece’s Plans to Rebuild Colossus of Rhodes,‛
Archaeology in Bulgaria (portal), January 5, 2016, http://archaeologyinbulgaria.co
m/2016/01/05/bulgarias-sozopol-to-restore-ancient-statue-of-apollo-colossus-of-apollonia-
pontica-not-unlike-greeces-plans-to-rebuild-colossus-of-rhodes/.

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Figure 4. Feet of the colossal figure of Apollo, as represented on a coin minted at

Apollonia Pontica, set on a base probably similar to the one Philo described for the
Colossus of Rhodes

The actual three-tiered pedestal on which the Colossus did stand with its
feet secured in the smaller white marble plinth at the top, had to have been a
very deep and substantial one. Such a gigantic statue, especially one described
by Philo as being built from the bottom up, would have to have had massive
supports built into its heavy pedestal foundation. Even had a shaft(s) been
excavated into the native limestone rock plateau of Monte Smith on Rhodes
(none has been located), like the one that can still be seen today on the Acropolis
in Athens designed to stabilize the Athena Promachos, such a shaft(s) could never
have been deep enough to secure a bronze statue the size of the Colossus. It was
about four times the height of the Promachos, which, comparatively speaking,
stood on a very small pedestal, remains of which can still be seen. So, too, the
Colossus never could have been held firmly in place merely by a small white
marble plinth set atop a larger pedestal.
Instead, the pedestal undoubtedly had a core of heavy limestone, faced with
the Rhodian gray-blue marble. Such facing procedures remained standard even
at the time of the Statue of Liberty, in order to protect the inner structural stones
from damage and to provide a more attractive finished appearance. It would also
have been less expensive than fashioning the entire pedestal for the Colossus out
of marble. Inside, giant iron ‚poles,‛ and/or monolithic columns of limestone,
sandstone, or granite (like those routinely produced in Egypt over the millennia),
were embedded deep in its heavy stone core-- and they would have extended up
through the pedestal, the white plinth, and the Colossus’ feet to its knees. There,
they were securely joined to the statue’s upper iron and stone interior frame.

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Figure 5. A fanciful reconstruction (after Antonio Tempesta, 1608) of the moment that
tradition, at least, says the Colossus was finally broken up by the Muslim conquerors of
Rhodes and the bronze carted off to Syria, where a Jewish merchant from Edessa carried it
away on 900 camels. Unfortunately, the illustration is of little value historically--
although in later centuries, it is not inconceivable that the Colossus’ “white base,” still
embedded with vestiges of its feet and lower legs, was moved and set up as a monument to
its former glory in the town center at Rhodes. The artist follows Strabo’s tradition that the
statue broke off at the knees, but the base shown (and reconstructed with the Colossus atop
it in the background) could never have supported a statue of that size. Also, it is more
likely that during the Muslim presence on Rhodes, there may have been a few pieces of
bronze still attributed (incorrectly) to the Colossus, but it was probably more some popular
tradition still circulating about the once great statue that started an erroneous story about
where the bronze had originated. By that date, 654 A.D., it is extremely unlikely any
verifiable pieces of the statue still survived. That it took 900 camels to carry it off is also
pure fantasy, especially since nothing is said about how the bronze was transported (at
least, in the version related by Constantine Porphorygenitus) to Syria in the first place. If
there is any truth at all to the story, it was probably bronze collected from Roman statues
in Africa and everywhere else in the eastern Mediterranean that the Muslims had
overrun, that was disposed of as an auction “lot.” Any publicity about the bronze once
belonging to the still well-known Colossus was a good “selling” point. There are several
variants to the story, and the tradition that Muslims sold the pieces to a Jew is too glaring
an irony in itself

The procedure is much the same as that described for the Statue of Liberty,
where the skeleton of the statue was so firmly attached to steel beams and girders

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embedded in its pedestal29 that it was said in jest (although it captures the general
feeling of the designers) that if the monument ever turned over, the statue and
pedestal would not separate as some might expect-- but the entire island on
which it stood would turn over with it. The same feeling must have initially been
attributed to how securely the Colossus had been ‚welded‛ to its pedestal,
because every measure known to Chares and his staff of experts would have been
employed to prevent its fall. To a large extent, their expertise was borne out: The
Colossus stayed firmly in place on its pedestal up to and including the
devastating earthquake of c.226 B.C. At that time, it was not the pedestal that
failed but the structure above the statue’s knees that did. The only way that could
have happened was if all the measures that had been devised, both internally and
externally, to keep the Colossus standing in place failed-- and the giant figure
broke at the knees. It had to have been an earthquake beyond what Chares or
anyone else had imagined.
Ironically, it may have been the same sturdy reinforcements Chares surely
employed to safeguard the Colossus that contributed to its collapse. Even if he
had used the three-tiered orthostatic earthquake platform system, which seems
certain, the support columns embedded in the pedestal may have equally served
as conductors, and the shock waves from this particular earthquake, instead of
being dissipated, traveled straight up the supports to violently shake the statue
and cause it to break at the weaker knee joints. It was the exact point in the
statue’s construction where the stronger pedestal reinforcements ended, and the
Colossus’ secondary iron and stone interior framework began.

(b) The Walls of Rhodes

Had the Colossus been standing at the time of Demetrius Poliorcetes’ siege of
Rhodes, its ‚knee problems‛ would not have mattered. The Rhodians had not
been expecting such a devastating attack and were not prepared when it did
happen. It is fair to say that, while precautions against earthquakes may have
been taken, they would not have foreseen what could happen to a statue the size
of the Colossus during war-- nor taken proper precautions to protect it. The
Colossus would have been demolished by the direct fire of Demetrius’ artillery.
Who knows how many other ‚colossal‛ and regular-sized sculptures were
actually destroyed during Demetrius’ siege had they not been protected or
temporarily stored-- like the bronzes unexpectedly recovered at Piraeus in 1959
that had been hidden during Sulla’s siege of the Athens in 87 B.C. (and then
forgotten) in secret ‚passages,‛ like the ones Strabo describes at Rhodes (14.5).
Later, when the Colossus was built, it could not be directly exposed to enemy
missiles if the city were attacked again-- and, considering the militaristic
atmosphere of the day, that was a realistic possibility. Anywhere the Colossus

29. Trachtenberg, Liberty, 142-143, Figure 83.

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was placed, at the very least it had to be protected behind the city’s great walls. It
also had to rise high enough above them to be seen in its entirety. Consequently,
it is only logical that the pedestal on which it stood had to be at least as tall as the
city walls. Perhaps, then, the walls of Rhodes will provide us with the best
estimate of the height of the Colossus’ pedestal.
It would only seem prudent that wherever the Colossus was placed,
considering what had recently occurred with Demetrius’ assault on the city,
especially the harbors, the largest statue ever built in the Greek world would have
the protection of the newly rebuilt walls. The same caution needed to be exercised
if only to protect Helios’ giant image from the frequent natural ‚assaults‛ that
plagued the island. Nothing would be gained from building the pedestal of the
statue into the new wall, itself. It might stabilize the Colossus’ foundations, but it
would still leave it open to a frontal assault by both man and nature and would
certainly be less aesthetic in appearance. That being the case, two other
alternatives come to mind: The Colossus was located behind the city walls, close
enough to be protected by them but standing independently on its pedestal in the
open; or, it could have stood in an enclosed precinct or sanctuary attached to the
wall, ultimately enclosing it on all sides but with access gates (something like the
remains of forts we still see along Hadrian’s Wall in England). In fact, like the
situation for the Statue of Liberty, it may have been built within the enclosure of
an already existing fortress. The Liberty was built on Bedloe’s Island directly on
old Fort Wood, already permanently ensconced there and whose star-shaped
bastions had to be incorporated in the final design of its pedestal.
An existing fortress, or fortress-like enclosure, may also have been involved
in the Colossus’ construction. Long after Monte Smith had served as the Rhodian
acropolis, it had been a British observation post during the Napoleonic War,
taking its name from Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith; and during World War
II, the Italians had gun emplacements there in what appears, from allied
reconnaissance photos, to be a fortress. High places in the earliest days of Ancient
Greek communities were fortresses for protection, as well as religious centers.
Usually, as the times became better, people moved down from the heights of their
acropolises. Urban centers developed below them, and the acropolises continued
to be sanctuaries for the city’s gods. Since Monte Smith was undeniably a most
strategic location and site of the acropolis of Rhodes, the suggestion that it also
continued to serve as a protective fortress atop the heights of the city overlooking
the main sea approaches to the city, is not just a suggestion— but an inevitable
outcome. Thus, there could well have been a fortress (or more than one) located
along the western high walls on the edge of Monte Smith that became less
important with the subsequent reinforcement of the new city walls of Rhodes and
whose new function became serving as a walled precinct for the Colossus. This
would, arguably, be a natural evolution of such a venerable site. Whatever the
case, the second of the above suggestions, accords best with all the requirements
needed to build, protect, and maintain the colossal monument— and, also, with

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its role as a lighthouse, which it has all the appearance of being (discussed at
length in another study).
With walls enclosing it all around and gates providing access into and out of
the interior, the Colossus would have stood on its pedestal in the middle of a
large, open precinct on the spacious heights of Monte Smith (perhaps not unlike
Suetonius’ description about how Nero’s colossus was originally to be displayed
in a large vestibule of Nero’s Domus Aurea)— near to, but separate from, the large
Temple of Athena and Zeus, the largest on the island, and other religious
structures in the immediate vicinity. Built into these walls (of appropriate
thickness) could also be quarters for the large number of men constantly needed
to service and maintain the Colossus (like the barracks Roman sailors apparently
lived in near the Colosseum to deploy its Velarium and attend to it otherwise).
Defensive towers could also double as housings for the high-standing service
equipment that would be needed to service and repair the 160-foot Colossus on
its pedestal. These must have included transformed siege towers of Demetrius,
which were the only available engines at the time capable of serving all the needs
of the giant statue, both inside and out (see discussion below). It had to be
maintained on a regular basis. A separate shrine dedicated to Helios could also
have been present— unless the entire complex were already viewed as such. As a
lighthouse, the Colossus could also be run daily, and its probable sun-reflecting
mirror(s) polished and serviced from such an enclosure-- its fiery night beacon(s),
most likely fueled with pine-based wood from the copious forests of Rhodes,
regularly supplied. In such a compound, everything would have been provided
to meet the Colossus’ needs. The question remains, however: How tall were the
walls of Rhodes?
While ancient writers, including Strabo, speak glowingly about the great
walls of Rhodes, no one mentions their height. In fact, it is just as difficult to
discover mention of wall heights at other cities around the ancient Greek world.
The walls of Rhodes City were destroyed, often by earthquakes, and rebuilt
stronger on several occasions, so one would think somebody would have
mentioned how high they rose— if only as a matter of pride. The walls would,
naturally, have varied in size depending on their particular location around the
city’s perimeter, and there were also numerous towers that were higher than the
walls. Even the display in the archaeological room of the Grand Master’s Palace
within the medieval walls at Rhodes that highlights the walls, provides only a
note about the width of the base of a section of the ancient wall: 4.2 meters, or
about 14 feet. It is not much to go on, but, proportionately, a base that thick would
immediately eliminate 10- or 15-foot walls— probably even twenty. One does not
build a wall thick enough to repel damage to its bottom from offensive machines
only to make its height woefully inadequate from attack by towering siege
machines. Twenty-five feet is probably the minimal height. That seems to be
reasonable because it appears to be the average height from which the lower
drawbridge of a typical 90-foot siege engine of the period crossed over to an

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opposing wall. There was no reason to employ a drawbridge at this height if it

were not going to provide its soldiers access to a wall of similar height. The
second drawbridge on the same siege engine, designed for attacking the towers of
a city wall, comes in twenty feet higher, at 45 feet. Both drawbridges were slightly
higher than their targets so that they would come to rest atop the city walls and
towers. These numbers are the result of E.W. Marsden’s careful study of siege
craft, in his work on Greek and Roman Artillery,30 and are as definitive as the
evidence allows.
Thus, the drawbridge levels of a typical siege engine of the day would put
the tallest walls and towers at Rhodes in the 25-45-foot range at the time of
Demetrius’ siege. Afterward, when the walls were restored, everything indicates
they were made even taller: The earlier walls had been inadequate to stop
Demetrius, and if Ptolemy had not interceded, the city probably would have
fallen. It was not a mistake the Rhodians would make again, and when the
Colossus was built, the walls must have been in the 30-50 feet range. Hence, the
Colossus’ pedestal would have to have stood at least fifty feet high for the giant
statue to be seen in its entirety above the new walls. Otherwise, the lower part of
the Colossus would have been entirely obscured.
A century earlier, Dionysius of Syracuse, whose military innovations were
legendary, protected his own city with the fortress of Euryalus, including the
most up-to-date defenses. It can probably safely be said that his wall towers
became the standard from which all subsequent designers based their own
defenses at other cities, Rhodes included. The towers (and walls) were specifically
designed for the military contingencies of the day, which included towers as high
as five stories, containing appropriate artillery at all levels. Archaeological
evidence indicates the towers were purposefully squared and as high as fifty-feet.
This also ‚squares‛ well with what has been described here for the walls of
Rhodes-- and there is no better evidence to reinforce it.31
Demetrius’ Helepolis, the tallest and most famous of his siege engines,32 was
significantly higher than even the new walls at Rhodes— by almost 100 feet.
There were not, of course (nor were there ever going to be), any city walls nine
stories high or 144-feet tall-- but part of the reason for the size of the Helepolis was
intimidation. It is not described as having any drawbridges because attempting to
deploy them at such a height would probably have made it top heavy— and it
would fall over. Its primary function in battle appears to have been to fire missiles
over the main city walls and beyond any additional interior walls, like those the
Rhodians had constructed, to the more vulnerable areas of the city behind them.

30. Marsden, Artillery, vi; 87, diagram 3; and 89, note 36.
31. Peter Connolly, Greece and Rome at War (1981; Reprinted with revisions, London:
Green Hill Books, 1998), 286-290. F.W. Walbank, and H.H. Scullard previously
acknowledged Connolly’s significant expertise on the ancient military.
32. Marsden, Artillery, 84, note 24.

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However, the Helepolis never appears to have been successfully utilized, and
Demetrius, apparently, by common agreement with the Rhodians, left it behind
when he ended the siege and departed.
It would not do if the formidable Helepolis, a ‛colossus‛ in its own right
among the sea of siege towers constructed for Hellenistic warfare, was not
surpassed in height by the Colossus-- a commemorative votive offering to Helios
constructed in honor of the terrible machine’s own defeat. Also, the Helepolis’
remnants were traditionally taken into the city and placed on display (Vitruvius,
de Architectura, 10). The Rhodians had ample opportunity to examine the weapon
from top to bottom-- and, almost 90 years ago, Albert Gabriel offered the very
cogent suggestion that whatever technical and engineering lessons Chares had
learned from his own examination of the Helepolis-- as well as its physical
remains-- were employed during his construction of the Colossus. 33 Gabriel’s
reconstruction of the Colossus in Figure 2 reflects his ideas.
There is no good reason to question the idea that the Helepolis-- or, for that
matter, any other siege engines left by Demetrius-- was used during the
construction of the Colossus and that it and the other remaining engines
continued in use, perhaps reduced in size for storage purposes, as maintenance
and repair towers. Practically speaking, there was no better machine to employ
both in building the Colossus and later in servicing it than the recycled siege
towers. With space for many workmen at different heights, internal ladders,
openings from bottom to top, rope and pulley machines-- as well as other
equipment formerly used to move weapons and ammunition about-- and
mobility, their usefulness in construction was just as valuable as in warfare by
simply converting everything to peacetime use. There does not appear to be any
other engineering tool available to do the necessary outside work at such
elevations. There were no standard independently operated cranes so tall. The
multi- purpose usefulness of these former war engines could not have been lost
on builders of major non-military projects.
The same might be said for the construction of the Colosseum at Rome three
centuries later. The Romans used siege craft at Masada in the Jewish Wars. They
built the Colosseum and used Jewish slave labor soon after. Why would the
Colosseum’s architects and engineers not have realized the benefits of employing
the same war machines used to defeat the Jews for peaceful reasons within the
same decade? Siege towers were certainly superior and more functional than any
other piece of construction equipment available. The recently discovered mosaic
at the synagogue of Huqoq depicting the use of a giant pulley system to raise
large stones for a scene depicting the construction the legendary Tower of Babel34

33. Gabriel, La Construction, 338.

34. A photo of the pertinent mosaic may be viewed at, James Rogers, ‚Stunning
Biblical mosaics Revealed in Detail for the First Time,‛ Fox News, November 16, 2018,

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is certainly a boon to our knowledge about standard ancient building techniques.

However, the Jews had no knowledge of constructing huge siege towers, the
mosaic is from the fifth century A.D., and the simple system depicted would only
be useful for assembling lower levels of stone edifices. It never could have served
in anything other than an ancillary role in the construction of the Colossus or the
Colosseum, both about 160 feet high at their tallest point.
The employment of ‚siege‛ towers for large scale construction projects
would also help fulfill the comment of Hopkins and Beard about how a ‚high
level of technical and theoretical architectural expertise,‛35 lost to us today, went
into the construction of the Colosseum. Some of the architects and engineers
working on the Colosseum had to have been with Titus in Judaea and seen for
themselves, if not helped build, the siege engines used there. After they returned
to Rome, they would have recognized how easily such mechanical behemoths
could be applied to civil construction projects-- as did Chares and the Rhodians
while building the Colossus in the immediate aftermath of Demetrius’ siege over
three centuries earlier.
At 144 feet, the Helepolis was almost as tall as the 160-foot Colossus (with
pedestal). We also know that siege towers in operation could be raised, as they
had been by the Romans at Masada, as high as they needed to be by moving
them upward on earthen ramps. From Marsden’s careful calculations, we also
know that the base of the Helepolis was an impressive 72 feet by 72 feet. Thus, a
144-foot tower needed a squared base of 72 to insure the necessary stability to
keep it upright and effective in battle. Under normal battle circumstances, neither
the Helepolis nor other siege towers appear to have had any problem moving or
turning on their wheels, demonstrating that their height to base ratio was
correctly calculated by their designers. If the same 2-1 formula of height-to-base
for the Helepolis is applied to the Colossus, which, while not mobile, was even
taller than the 144-foot Helepolis and still needed its weight distributed correctly
from its top to its base, the 160-foot statue would have required a pedestal with a
base about eighty-feet square in order to remain upright. Based on this scheme, a
fifty-foot high pedestal with an eighty-square foot base may be the closest
approximation for what was required to support the 110-foot colossal bronze
statue of Helios on top of it. Interestingly, at one early stage in Richard Morris
Hunt’s designs for the Statue of Liberty pedestal, he also used the same ratio
whereas its base to height was about twice as high as the width of its base.36
Demetrius’ Helepolis, of course, was a single construction and moved as a
unit, so the weight distribution at its bottom would have been calculated with

https://www.foxnews.com/science/stunning-biblical-mosaics-revealed-in-detail-for-the-fir
st-time.
35. Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum, Wonders of the World, vol. 19
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 142-143.
36. Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty, 160.

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that in mind. The Colossus was not a single unit. It was standing on its pedestal,
so the weight distribution was divided between the top of the pedestal that held
the Colossus and the base of the pedestal, itself. How much difference that would
have made, if any, is unclear, but the Helepolis’ base had to bear the weight of
everything above it, while its multiple stone wheels and axles were still able to be
turned with apparent ease. The Colossus’s pedestal was firmly joined to the
statue, but one would surmise that it would still have had to distribute the weight
at its base equally to keep the entire construction stable. Exterior support(s) or
column(s), presuming Chares had followed his mentor Lysippus’ practice, also
helped to steady it.
Although a ‚single unit,‛ the Helepolis was composed, like the Colossus, of
sections built on top of one another and firmly attached to each other by wood
and metal. At the height of 144 feet, the construction process used does not
appear to have seriously affected the Heliopolis’ movement and operation.
Because we do not have corresponding details about how the Colossus was held
together, we can turn to the method by which the engineers of the Statue of
Liberty attached the skeleton of the Statue to its pedestal by joining it to steel
beams or girders embedded in the latter that directly tied the two ‚units‛
together. It represented a new technology that combined iron and concrete.37
Hence, the Statue was literally sealed into the heavy foundation base and
permanently fastened to it— rendering it, as noted earlier, a single basic unit in
regard to its weight distribution.
Until the nineteenth century, the same type of masonry construction used
when the Colossus was built had not changed significantly. With the Statue of
Liberty, concrete was also used on a massive scale for the first time, its greatest
characteristic being its technologically superior ability, a quantum leap, to
strengthen significantly the age-old process of embedding supports within a
masonry structure. We have already suggested that a similar system of iron or
stone ‚columns‛ fastened the Colossus firmly to its base, likewise sealing, as far
as the technology of the day allowed, the statue into its heavy stone foundation:
The fact that the pedestal and statue had started out separately appears to have
made no difference because they were joined so completely that the entire stress
would have been borne at the base of the pedestal.
By way of comparison with the Statue of Liberty, her copper base rests (along
with her 25-foot feet) on the 40 x 40-foot top of an 89-foot pedestal constructed
beneath her. That same pedestal at its base is 62 x 62 feet, where it is joined to the
to the 66-7-foot squared top of the foundation, whose lowest level is below
ground and ends in a squared bottom of 91 x 91 feet. The final dimensions of the
Liberty’s bases are, then, from bottom to top, 91 x 91 feet, 62 x 62 feet, and 40 x 40
feet-- and the total height of its foundation and pedestal together is 154 feet.
However, the Statue of Liberty, itself, is only 151 feet high, including the extended

37. Ibid. 151.

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torch arm, leaving the measurement of the Statue from heels to head at 111-6 feet,
approximately the same height as the Colossus of Rhodes.

Figure 6. The 45-foot pedestal of Agrippa on the stairway to the Propylaea before entering
the Athenian Acropolis perhaps provides something of a visual aid for our discussion
about the Colossus’ pedestal. This pedestal, as seen here, is from the time of Agrippa,
whose favor toward the city was rewarded with his representation upon it. However, its
history goes back much earlier, and it is thought that a quadriga was originally displayed
on it. Without a statue today, most visitors pass right by it, reaffirming our earlier
suggestion about how Philo would have paid little attention to the Colossus’ pedestal. This
pedestal is close in height to the one proposed for the Colossus, though it certainly is not
substantial enough to display a 110-foot statue. Nonetheless, its construction still may be
instructive. It has a multi-tiered base of about 15-feet, on which a tapering pedestal
stretches up another thirty feet, with a plinth at the top to which the statuary was
originally attached

These figures are included for interest—but despite the differences of the two
huge display platforms for the Colossus and Liberty in height and the raw
materials used in their construction, from what has been proposed here they both
end up with bottom bases of about the same dimensions and display colossal
statues of about the same size. Engineering problems do not change appreciatively
over time, nor do the laws of physics, weight distribution, and the need to adapt a
project to the peculiarities of a structure’s location. Nonetheless, the aforementio-
ned figures for Liberty may provide an approximate impression of what the
proportions may have been at the tops of the three tiers of the Colossus’ pedestal
as they ascended upward-- and the Statue of Liberty’s 25-foot long feet on a 40 x
40-foot base is more than a good indicator since the white marble plinth on which

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the Colossus directly stood similarly had to accommodate its feet, which must
have been about the same size.

(c) A Circular Pedestal?

Finally, there is the lingering tradition that continues to place the Colossus of
Rhodes on something of a circular base-- including speculative renderings like
Salvador Dali’s striking 1954 lithograph of the giant statue. Gabriel believed38
that he had found the answer in the small harbor side circular Byzantine
fortress of St. Nicholas, which stands at the mouth of Mandraki harbor at the
end of the mole at Rhodes-- and the spot where the most famous (but entirely
erroneous) depiction of the Colossus bestriding the harbor entrance placed his
right foot. Gabriel found stone remains there which he identified as reused from
the ruins of the Colossus and discovered enough evidence for a circular base to
argue its validity (although this ‚circular character‛ is not clearly represented in
his Figure 2 above). More recent work suggested that the fortress’ core was built
on a contemporary classical circular structure of about the same size needed to
support a statue the size of the Colossus. 39 We can never be certain about
anything regarding the Colossus, but aside from a few well-known small Greek
circular structures at places like Athens, Olympia, Delphi, Epidaurus, and
Cnidus, and smaller circular statue bases and pillars, the Greeks did not seem
overly interested in large rounded constructions. They certainly posed more
problems than the ubiquitous square cornered buildings— and that would
definitely have included a pedestal large enough to hold the weight of the
Colossus. The ultimate question is about why Chares would have troubled
himself to experiment with the round shape-- especially when the Rhodians were
refortifying their walls at that very moment and building 50-foot, squared,
pedestal-like defensive towers.
Since a lighthouse stands today atop the St. Nicholas fortress’ tower on the
harbor at Rhodes, it probably would make more sense to interpret what Gabriel
and others have found there that might be attributed to a pedestal for the
Colossus as the remains of an early lighthouse-- perhaps constructed along the
lines of the Pharos lighthouse at Alexandria, whose lower walls also encased a
circular interior. Both it and the Colossus were planned/built during the first part
of the third century B.C., when the Rhodians and the Ptolemies were especially
close and shared ideas about many things— including engineering and
architecture. A smaller lighthouse on Rhodes’ major commercial harbor is not
only likely but probable, even while the Colossus was standing elsewhere above
it. Certainly, that is a more logical explanation for whatever the Hellenistic
remains are that have been identified at St. Nicholas.

38. Gabriel, La Construction, 347-359.

39. See discussion in Romer, Seven Wonders, 32-33.

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There is also little compelling evidence to suggest that major ancient port
cities were accustomed to erecting large colossal statues, whether on square or
round bases, at their harbor entrances. We would think Pliny would have
mentioned at least one, specifically, in his discussion of colossi (34.18.39-48).
He does refer to the 45-foot bronze of Apollo at Apollonia Pontica (see, Figure
4) on the Black Sea but says nothing about it actually standing at the harbor
entrance there, where moderns wishing to reconstruct it want to place it.
Recent archaeology has shown that it was not at the harbor at all but on an
island (modern St. Cyricus) across from the city with its temple. Pliny says
little specific about the locations of the Greek colossi about which he speaks
other than the names of the cities in which they stood when the Romans
carried them off to the capital. His silence may, of course, mean nothing-- but,
it could also be because there was little or no Greek practice of placing colossal
statues at harbor entrances. Pliny does mention that the Romans failed to
move Lysippus’ colossal statue of Zeus at Tarentum, a busy port— but he says
nothing about that difficulty being caused because the statue was at the
harbor entrance. It is more likely that the Greeks looked for more practical
locations for their colossi than congested harbor entrances, where they always
would have presented difficulties and been in the way. One would certainly
think that Athens, at least, a city with well-known colossal statues, would
have placed a huge statue of Athena at the entrance to the Piraeus, if it were
normal Greek practice to do such things.
Even with the Colossus as the main light tower on top of Monte Smith high
above Rhodes City on the acropolis, there would still have been a need for a
harbor height lighthouse to guide ships directly into their moorings. That
certainly seems a more reasonable explanation because at any given time, there
would have been countless ships waiting to dock at one of the greatest ports in
the Eastern Mediterranean. The ‚spillover‛ must have been tremendous, and it
would have extended far outside the designated harbor areas and down the
adjacent coasts. Today, there is a lighthouse on top of the old fortress at
Mandraki.
There also could have been a large statue of Helios standing on the mole,
as Gabriel speculated. None, however, could have been the size of the
Colossus, whose complexity and special construction needs were daunting
even on the more open grounds atop Monte Smith. To attempt to build such a
statue in the center of what was one of the busiest harbor areas in the
Mediterranean would not only have been a foolhardy but also an obstruction
to sea traffic-- reputedly over a twelve-year period. During this same time, the
entire port would have been completely exposed to another attack by
Demetrius Poliorcetes or another Macedonian warlord while it was being
built. The immediate sea water and effect of the salty sea air on the Colossus’
exterior would have made its bronze skin difficult to maintain; corrosion to
the more susceptible iron interior frame would have been devastating. Today,

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the same deterioration process is seriously affecting bridge cables and the blades
of giant wind towers in salt water locations, requiring constant inspection and
maintenance and costing great sums of money. Ship traffic lanes for Rhodes
could not have been much different from what they are today. Most ships still
depart and arrive from the ‚blind side‛ of the main harbor. We would have to
accept that Rhodians, many who were not regularly at sea, would have been
content to see their Colossus only from its hind side because that would be the
main landward view. As shown in the ‚enhanced‛ photo in Figure 7, the
Colossus could only be seen fully if it did stand atop Monte Smith.
Realistically, it would be very difficult to recommend the placement of the
Colossus on a circular, or any other type of pedestal, for that matter, on the
harbors at Rhodes. There had never been anything like the Colossus built before
and to experiment with it on the water’s edge would have been impractical-- and
dangerous. Even today with modern skyscraper construction in congested
downtown areas, the work, now refined to textbook procedure, still affects for
long periods the adjacent businesses, streets, traffic, and pedestrians below.
It is also interesting to note that circular-style designs for the pedestal of the
Statue of Liberty-- which, as already seen, was inspired by the Colossus and
shares common characteristics with what we know about it-- were discarded
early on. At the time of the building of the Liberty, the aura of ‚The Seven
Wonders‛ was still so much a part of the architectural atmosphere of the day that
preliminary designs for its pedestal and foundation base included the ‚Pharos‛
series, intended to evoke the cylindrical core and circular upper tier of the Great
Lighthouse at Alexandria. The so-called ‚Pharos Coins‛ from the Alexandrian
mint of Imperial Rome, most produced during the second century A.D., also
preserved profile views of the structure that made it look circular-- although the
initial plan that the Liberty was also to act as lighthouse (the first American one to
use electricity) was probably enough by itself to evoke the popular concept that
all lighthouses, ancient or modern, had always been round towers with a light
beacon at the top.
The early ‚Pharos‛ design of Richard Morris Hunt, one of whose plans for
Liberty’s pedestal was ultimately selected, was described by Trachtenberg as ‚a
classically rusticated cylinder‛40 and indicates that Hunt was at least trying to
keep with the more established, but largely romantic, ideas about what the
Pharos Lighthouse had once looked like. His original aspiration for the Liberty
may have been a desire, as Trachtenberg also suggests,‛ to combine the Colossus
of Rhodes with the Pharos of Alexandria?‛ 41 Ultimately, such plans were
abandoned in favor of a more practical ‚squared‛ pedestal and foundation--
tastefully decorated but not so distracting as to diminish the image of Liberty
standing upon it. In the case of the Liberty, the final choice was the result of a

40. Trachtenberg, Liberty, 158-159, especially Figures 88 and 90.

41. Ibid., 165.

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number of considerations that were functional, aesthetic, and personal. They did
not include a circular pedestal.

Figure 7. Composite photo, illustrating how the Colossus would have been viewed from
the harbors at Rhodes, if located atop the acropolis on Monte Smith. Its position there was
also ideal to make it the primary lighthouse for Rhodes. (Note: Statue image is the
approximate size of the actual Colossus, but its configuration is one of a number of modern
speculations). Photo property of author

Chares and his colleagues at Rhodes were just as much aware of the
problems of a circular rather than squared pedestal supporting the massive
weight of the Colossus, which included interior iron work and stones. There
already were tall columns with statues mounted on their tops, but to build a
‚column‛ so large that it could support something the size of the Colossus was an
entirely different proposition. Whether Chares ever experimented with the idea
cannot be known, but local masonry construction favored the squared tower
construction. The Rhodians were rebuilding their city wall towers at the very
same time the Colossus was entering construction. Since that technology was so
readily available, there is no reason to suspect that it would not also have been
employed in building the pedestal for the Colossus—as if it were another 50-foot
squared defensive tower, only tiered.
The short discussion of Rhodes’ fortifications in the Grand Palace’s
archaeological rooms, quotes Aelius Aristides’ much later description of the

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towers of Rhodes’ walls as looking ‚straight as candles‛ from the sea, seeming to
suggest that, like the circular towers that are so familiar in the Medieval walls of
Rhodes seen today, the towers in Aristides’ day were also round. However,
Aristides’ Rhodian Orations date from four centuries after the Colossus and after
Rhodes was devastated in another earthquake in 142 A.D. That makes Aristides’
observations useless for our purposes.
The new siege techniques of the Hellenistic period also favored square wall
towers. Squared towers had the advantage over round simply because of the
additional space in a squared tower. One simply could not allow siege towers to
get to the walls. As previously noted, Dionysius I’s new fortress of Euryalus at
Syracuse, the most siege proof fortress of the day and whose ruins are still
impressive, had at least five squared towers, probably as high as 50 feet, the
height proposed here for the towers at Rhodes. Catapults and other weapons
needed to point at several levels in all directions from which attackers came.
Mobile siege towers, the greatest threat of the day, had floors of weapons and
were squared. One did not see Demetrius advancing upon the walls and towers
of Rhodes in a round siege tower, 144-feet high. The fact that its surfaces were
flat-faced also reveals that his siege towers were not designed to attack round
towers.
The use of siege tower technology in peacetime construction projects also
favors a square shape. Envisioning a 110- foot bronze statue placed on top of a 50-
foot high ‚defensive tower‛ pedestal is certainly more acceptable than a massive
circular masonry base. The columns at Karnak in Egypt were about as large as
columns were going to get— and a singular unreinforced one to support the
weight of the Colossus 50-feet above it would immediately present unwanted
problems in stability— especially in earthquake territory.
The most definitive evidence against a circular pedestal for the Colossus
perhaps comes from the architectural remains of the Pharos Lighthouse, itself,
when it was described by an Arab explorer in the twelfth century. He relates that
the base of the Lighthouse had an interior circular core and staircase, but the
outside of the building was squared with a sloping incline as it rose up almost 58
meters. The architectural realities seem clear. The inside circular core could not
endure standing on its own, and, subsequently, had to be reinforced by building
strong masonry walls to reinforce the exterior. If it could not maintain its integrity
as an independent circular structure, then neither could a circular pedestal for the
Colossus.
Realistic considerations would appear to have eliminated any early ideas
about a circular pedestal for the Colossus. Such an idea would certainly have
been discarded in its planning stages— just as it was in the case of the Statue of

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Liberty. A tower-like, squared, earthquake proof, three-tiered pedestal was the

only sound decision— from both an architectural and engineering standpoint.42

Concluding Observations

Based on the evidence presented, the Colossus of Rhodes was at least 110-
feet high, was mounted on a three-tier pedestal that was about 50-feet high,
whose construction subscribed to the earthquake technology of the day. The
dimensions of each tier would accord with how the weight of the statue
would have been distributed. The bottom tier compares nicely with that of
Demetrius’ Heliopolis, which appears to have been close to the ultimate height
of the Colossus and pedestal. The 50-foot height for the pedestal also appears
appropriate when compared to the walls of Rhodes. The pedestal probably
had a core of limestone blocks that was faced with native gray-blue Rhodian
marble. At the very top was, as described by Philo, a white marble ‚base,‛ or
more correctly, plinth, in which the soles of the Colossus’ feet were firmly
embedded. Metal and/or stone reinforcements must have extended through
the feet to the statue’s knees from the pedestal below and have been anchored
securely. Chares probably provided, as his master, Lysippus, had for his 60-
foot colossus statue of Zeus at Tarentum, an additional anchoring ‚column(s)‛
of some appropriate design to further stabilize the Colossus. Whether it was
built into the pedestal or was a short distance from the statue, it failed, too, to
hold the Colossus erect during the fatal earthquake.

42. Interesting to the discussion, nonetheless, is a circular building standing on Monte

Smith today, not far from its summit and in the vicinity of where we place the actual
location for the Colossus. Although its diameter looks to be only about 30 feet, World War
II reconnaissance photos show it to be existing at that time. What is was, what it is, what
was (and is) inside it, and what lies underneath it is anyone’s guess-- impossible to know
because it is now off limits, covered with protective wire, and closed to the public. I
include a photo of it below (Figure 8) only for interest’s sake, if anyone wishes to pursue it
further.

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Figure 8. The Circular Building near The Summit of Monte Smith, Above Rhodes City

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