The Greek Sculptor Who Built the Colossus of Rhodes and May Have Killed Himself When It Cracked

Chares of Lindos was the principal sculptor of the Colossus of Rhodes — the 33-metre bronze statue of the sun-god Helios that stood at the entrance to Mandraki Harbour from approximately 280 to 226 BC and was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. He had been a pupil of the great Sicyonian master Lysippos, who had been Alexander the Great’s preferred portraitist and substantively the most influential Greek sculptor of the late 4th century BC. Chares brought the Lysippan workshop tradition to Rhodes.

He worked on the Colossus for approximately twelve years.

The commission

The Republic of Rhodes had successfully repelled a substantial siege by Demetrius Poliorcetes (‘the Besieger’) in 305–304 BC. Demetrius had brought up a substantial siege army of approximately 40,000 men and the 50-metre wheeled siege tower Helepolis (‘City-Taker’); the Rhodian defence had held for 14 months; Demetrius abandoned the siege and withdrew, leaving behind bronze siege equipment that the Rhodians sold at profit.

The Rhodians used the proceeds — approximately 300 talents of silver — to commission a votive offering to Helios, the patron deity of the city, in thanks for their deliverance. Chares of Lindos received the commission in approximately 292 BC.

What he built

The Colossus was approximately 33 metres tall — about the height of the modern Statue of Liberty without its pedestal. It was built from cast-bronze plates riveted over an internal iron framework, with the iron framework anchored by counterweighted feet and the bronze plates shaped to the Hellenistic conventional iconography of Helios (a youthful nude male figure, radiate crown, outstretched arm holding a torch).

The standard scholarly judgment is that the statue stood on a single 15-metre pedestal at the harbour entrance — not straddling the harbour mouth with feet on opposite breakwaters, the pose that the later medieval European tradition came to associate with the monument (most famously in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus”). The straddling-pose tradition is physically impossible for a 33-metre bronze statue and is a post-classical embellishment.

Chares completed the statue in approximately 280 BC, twelve years after starting.

The suicide tradition

The late-antique encyclopedist Pliny the Elder records (Natural History XXXIV.41) a story that Chares killed himself before the statue was complete. The reasons given are mathematical: Chares had calculated the bronze-plate stress profile for a statue of a specific height; the Rhodian commissioners demanded he double the height to a larger figure; Chares substantively did so but discovered too late that the stress profile for the doubled height exceeded the structural capacity of his design. He substantively killed himself in despair.

The story is probably apocryphal — Pliny is writing 350 years after the events and the substantive structural-engineering details match no actual statue we know about — but it captures something substantively true about the scale ambitions of the Hellenistic period. The Colossus was substantively at the limit of what Greek bronze-casting technology could produce; it was substantively the principal precedent for the subsequent Lighthouse of Alexandria, which substantively also pushed the substantive technological frontier.

The earthquake

The Colossus stood for approximately 54 years. The 226 BC Rhodes earthquake — the regional event that also produced structural damage to the nearby Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — knocked the statue at the knees. It fell in pieces in the harbour mouth and remained there for approximately the next 800 years.

The Rhodians substantively refused to rebuild it. The Delphic oracle had substantively pronounced that the Colossus had substantively offended Helios by its substantive ambition; rebuilding would substantively risk further substantive divine retribution. The broken bronze pieces lay in the harbour until the 7th-century AD Arab conquest of Rhodes, when (per a 9th-century Arab source) they were substantively sold for scrap to a Syrian-Jewish merchant who carried them away on 900 camel-loads.

The Colossus is the substantive only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World whose substantive sculptor we substantively know by name.