The Bronze God of Rhodes

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The following characters in this story were real persons: Alkimos (or Alcimus), Amyntas, Ananias, Antigonos, Apelles, Apollonios, Aristodemos, Athenaios (or Athenaeus), Athenagoras, Berosos (or Berossos, -us), Boêdas, Chares, Daïppos, Damophilos, Damoteles, Demetrios Antigonou (later called Demetrios Poliorketes, "the Besieger"), Demetrios Phalereus, Dikaiarchos (or Dicaearchus), Diognetos, Epimachos, Eudemos, Eukleides (or Euclid), Euthykrates, Eutychides, Evagoras (or Euagoras), Hieronymos, Hekataios (or Hecataeus), Kallias (or Callias), Lysippos, Manethôs (or Manetho, -on), Menedemos, Menelaos, Philemon, Protogenes, Ptolemaios Lagou (or Ptolemaeus or Ptolemy I, later called Ptolemaios Soter, "the Savior"), Theodoros, and Zenon (or Zeno).

In a few names, where it might make a difference in the Anglicized pronunciation, I have indicated the long Greek vowels w by ê and ô respectively. Thus, in Anglicized form, "Kôs" and "Thôth" rhyme with "dose" and "both," while "Tychê" rhymes with "my key.", "Dikaiarchos," not being a well-known name, has no established Anglicized pronunciation; for those not up to tackling the Greek, "dick-ire-cuss" will do. "Chares" is adequately rendered as "Carey's."

In the Egyptian sequence, the Sosorthos, Imouthes, Souphis, Sesostris, Toutimaios, Amosis, Amenophthis, Rhameses Osymandyas, Sethenes Chamois, and Apries mentioned by Chares and his informants are the Zoser, Imhotep, Khufu (Herodotos' Cheôps), Senusert III, [Dedu]mes, Aahmes I, Amenhotep III, Rameses II (Shelley's Ozymandias), Setek-hnakht and Khaemwaset (two separate men confused by later generations), and Wahabra II of Egyptian history. The spellings are mostly those of Manethôs himself, in the surviving fragments of his work, as Chares would naturally have obtained most of his information from Manethôs .

Berosos and Manethôs both wrote histories, in Greek, of their respective peoples, as in the story they vowed to do. Both works are lost, though a good idea of their contents can be obtained from the numerous fragments (quotations, citations, and outlines) in the works of later writers. All that is actually known of these authors is as follows: Manethôs was a priest of Sebennytos who was active at the courts of the first two Ptolemies, took part in founding the Graeco-Egyptian cult of Sarapis, and wrote his Egyptian history at Heliopolis. Berosos was a priest of Marduk, probably a little older than Manethôs , who invented the hemicyclic sundial, taught astrology and astronomy at Kôs, lectured at Athens, and wrote his Babylonian history at the court of Antiochos I. Sending Berosos to Rhodes and Egypt and having him meet Manethôs are fictional contrivances.

Manethôs ' tale of the invasions of the Hyksos is, probably, a wildly inaccurate account of the Egyptian history of the time in question. But it represents the real Manethôs ' beliefs (Josephus: Against Apion, I, 14—31) and is perhaps no wider of the mark than the Hebraic tradition. The legend of the Book of Thôth, as told by Manethôs , occurs in a papyrus of Ptolamaic times.

Likewise, the opinions attributed to Dikaiarchos of Messana on such subjects as war, prophecy, and the soul, though they may sound a trifle anachronistic, are opinions the real man held. Although Dikaiarchos' original works have all perished, some of his doctrines have been preserved by Cicero and other ancient authors.

The "scorpion," mentioned by Chares in connection with the siege of Rhodes, is the crossbow, also called in ancient times the cheiro-ballista, "hand catapult," and gastraphetês, "belly weapon." The crossbow was well known to the Classical from the fourth century B.C. on, although it never attained the popularity it later achieved in medieval Europe.

Subsequently, to confuse matters, the name "scorpion" was applied to a quite different stone-throwing catapult, invented after Chares' time. This later engine had a single throwing arm, with a spoon or sling on its end, which flew up in a vertical plane against a stop. It was also called an "onager" (wild ass) from that animal's mythical habit of kicking stones back at its pursuers.

I was tempted to call all catapults "guns" and their crews "gunners," since the original meaning of "gun," like that of the Greek katapeltês and ballista and the German Geschiitz, is simply "shooter" or "thrower"—that is, any missile engine, firearms included. However, such usage might have bewildered some readers.

The precise nature of the triemiolia (literally, "triple one-and-a-half er"), the antipirate cruiser built by the Rhodians, is open to question. One opinion is that it had two banks of oars, with two men on each upper oar and one on each lower; another is that it had the regular trireme's arrangement of three banks of one-man oars, but with special facilities for removing the oars and benches from the after half of the upper deck to make room for the sail and rigging when these were stowed for a fight. See the Loeb Classical Library: Diodorus Siculus, Vol. X, p. 389, n. 3; and the Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 78, pp. 14-18.

I used "lune" as a convenient equivalent of "crescentic wall."

The months of the Attic calendar were, in order: Hekatombaion (from late June to late July), Metageitnion, Boedromion, Pyanepsion, Maimakterion, Poseideon, Gamelion, Anthesterion, Elaphebolion, Mounychion, Thargelion, and Skirophorion.

Getika, the land overrun by the Kelts in Chares' time, corresponds more or less to modern Wallachia in the Balkans.

The story of the siege of Rhodes in 305-4 B.C. is told by Diodorus Siculus: Book XX; Vitruvius: Book X; and Plutarch: Demetrius. The three accounts are not altogether consistent. Minor details are added by other authors, such as Aulus Gellius.

Most of the information on the building of the Colossus is in Of the Seven Wonders of the World, by Philon of Byzantium. Shorter accounts occur in Pliny the Elder (XXXIV, xviii, 41-42) and Strabo (XIV, ii, 5). Minor allusions to it appear in the works of other classical authors.

Pliny gives most of our information about Chares and his fellow artists Lysippos, Apelles, and Protogenes. In the story of Apelles' purchase of Protogenes' pictures, Pliny says that Apelles paid Protogenes fifty talents (300,000 drachmai). This seems to me wildly improbable, as the sum would be the rough equivalent, in purchasing power, to half a million or a million dollars. I therefore reduced the price to fifty pounds (5,000 drachmai), equivalent to ten or twenty thousand dollars.

Almost nothing is definitely known about Chares of Lindos save that he studied under Lysippos, worked mostly in bronze, built the Colossus, and also made a colossal head, later taken to Rome. Eutychides, mentioned in the first book, was the sculptor of the Fortune of Antioch and possibly of the Victory of Samothrace.

The Colossus is said to have been 70 cubits high. This may mean 90, 105, or 120 feet, depending on which of several different cubits is assumed. It may be compared with the Statue of Liberty, which stands 151 feet from base to torch, or 111 from heel to crown. In the first century A.D., Nero had a statue of himself, as large as the Colossus of Rhodes, erected in Rome. Vespasian later turned it into a statue of Helios by putting a crown of solar rays, like those borne by the Rhodian Helios, on its head.

Chares' Colossus stood for 56 years and then, in 224 B.C., was overthrown by an earthquake (Polybius V, 88). The "colossal wreck" lay on the ground until the Saracen conquest. In 656 A.D., an Arab general, Mu'ôwiyah, scrapped it and shipped the bronze to Syria. There a Jewish merchant of Edessa bought it and carried it off on 900 (or 980) camels, presumably to be turned into trays and lamps.

Here is a puzzle. Philon says that the statue contained 500 talents (15 tons) of bronze and 300 talents (9 tons) of iron. As a healthy camel can carry 500 pounds without strain, either the weight of the bronze in the statue or the number of camels must be wrong, because the number of camels given could carry 225 (or 245) tons. If the statue contained only 15 tons of bronze, the bronze would have to be about one-sixteenth of an inch thick, which seems like too flimsy a structure to withstand wind pressure.

More likely, the number of camels is right, but the weight of the bronze is grossly understated, and the bronze averaged about an inch thick. This inference is supported by Philon's statement that building the Colossus caused a temporary scarcity of bronze. Compare the Statue of Liberty, of the same general size, which weighs 225 tons, including 100 tons for the copper sheeting. As Chares' Helios and Bartholdi's Liberty were of about the same size, one would expect the latter to weigh somewhat less, because Bartholdi had steel girders to work with while Chares did not.

Some well-known stories about the Colossus, which appeared long after the statue was built, can be more or less safely rejected. One is the statement of Sextus Empiricus, who wrote about 500 years after Chares erected the statue. Sextus (Against the Logicians, I, 107-8) said that at first the statue was planned to be half its eventual height. When the city decided to double the height, Chares asked for only twice the original fee, forgetting that the material would be increased eightfold; this error drove him to bankruptcy and suicide. It seems incredible that a man with the engineering skill that Chares must have had should not have known the square-cube law. A similar story, probably no more authentic, was told of Lysippos.

More stories appeared in the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years after Chares' time, and several centuries after the remains of the statue had been junked. The best-known of these says that the Colossus bestrode the harbor:

Its feet rested on the ends of two moles, so that ships passed between its legs. This legend, impossible for engineering reasons, was perhaps suggested by the remains of fortifications on the ends of the moles. While the exact location of the statue is not known, some scholars think that it stood either near the site of the existing Mosque of Murad Reis or near that of the Castle of the Knights of Rhodes.

Other medieval tales averred that the Colossus was 900 feet tall (also technically impossible) and that it had a beacon in its head (not impossible, but unlikely because of the difficulty of getting fuel up to the beacon).

The only circumstantial account of the founding of the Library of Alexandria (aside from a brief statement in Diogenes Laertius' Demetrius) is at the beginning of the so-called Letter of Aristeas to Philokrates, used by Josephus (Jewish Antiquities, XII, ii) and other later Judaeo-Christian writers. While this is a work of fiction, written at least a century after its Active date, it preserves a few historical facts. Like the works derived from it, it confuses the first two Ptolemies.

The Library was founded by the first Ptolemy and reached its definitive form under the second, but all of the rulers of this dynasty (save perhaps the seventh Ptolemy, who favored the native Egyptians against the Greek ruling class) added to it. At its height, it held nearly three-quarters of a million rolls. Most of these, however, must have been duplicates, as there were not enough authors in the ancient world to produce so many separate titles.

A series of fires and depredations during the Roman period gradually destroyed the Library. As the books were stored in two or more buildings, no single fire accounted for all of them. When Julius Caesar occupied Alexandria in 48 B.C., Cleopatra urged him to help himself to the books, and he took away hundreds or thousands to be shipped to Rome. Then Alexandria revolted against Caesar and Cleopatra. In the fighting, either the books that Caesar had taken or those still in one of the libraries, or both, were burnt. When Antonius formed his connection with Cleopatra, he stole and gave her the 200,000-roll library of Pergamon to replace the losses.

The Library probably suffered further damage when Aurelian suppressed the revolt of Firmus in Alexandria in a.d. 272; again when Diocletian put down another revolt in 295; again when the Bishop Theophilus, a bloodthirsty fanatic of the Hitlerian type, led a Christian mob to the destruction of the Serapeion in 391. The remains were finished off by the Arabs of the Muslim general 'Amr ibn al-'Âs when he captured the city in 646. A story relates that when 'Amr wrote his Khalif, asking what to do with these books of the infidels, he received the reply that if they agreed with the Qur'ân they were superfluous, whereas if they disagreed with it they were pernicious, so it were well to destroy them: a suitable maxim for all true believers.

Modern apologists for the Arabs have denied this story and put all the onus of the destruction on the Christians. Christian apologists, on the other hand, have striven to exculpate the godly Theophilus and put the blame back on the Muslims. In fact, we shall never know just how many books were destroyed at each predation, nor to what extent the destruction was due simply to the agents of time and neglect—mice and mold, thieves and termites—suffered to work their will unchecked when, with the rise of Christianity, governments lost interest in the preservation of mundane writings. All we can say for sure is that monotheism proved as deadly a foe to learning as war and barbarism. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

For the weights, measures, and coinage of the time and their modern equivalents, see the Postscript to my previous historical novel, An Elephant for Aristotle. During the twenty years between the active dates of the two novels, inflation, caused by Alexander's spending of the treasure of the Persian kings, more than doubled the prices of commodities in the Greek world.