Out of these lists was born the idea of the Seven Wonders of the World (the “ancient,” naturally, was added much later). In addition to the accounts of the philosophers, the ancients were well ahead of our modern media trends, and they were very much into making lists “of memorabilia, of wonderful things,” Lapatin said. “And then Philo of Alexandria more of an engineering book, and he’s interested in it for how it was made.” “ Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which is a massive book that was divided into 37 volumes treating the earth, the seas, minerals, pigments, and in the section on bronze, on metals, Pliny talks about this amazing statue, amazing just because it was so big,” Lapatin said. But what we do have are two references to it in important ancient texts. We don’t have any fragments of the statue that once stood or even sketches or drawings of what it once looked like. When it was finally finished in 280 B.C., the result, by all accounts, was stunning. Chares was a good pick-he not only hailed from a town on the island of Rhodes, but he was also a student of Lysippus, one of Alexander the Great’s favorite sculptors.Ĭhares would become known for making several large-scale sculptures over the course of his career, but none was as large as the statue of Helios that would take him 12 years to complete. The city commissioned the sculptor Chares of Lindos to lead this project. When the Macedonian army fled, they left behind a trove of equipment and weapons.Īccording to the legends, the Rhodians took this loot and sold part of it off for money-the remainder was melted down for material-and those resources were used to construct a giant monument to their patron god. The Rhodians, on the other hand, not only wrested back their freedom, but they also got a little booty to go along with it.

The leader of the Macedonians, son of one of Alexander the Great’s best generals, was forever after saddled with a nickname mocking his loss-he is known to this day as Demetrius Poliorcetes, or Demetrius “the Besieger.” In 305 B.C., the Rhodians vanquished their attackers. Helios may not have been able to prevent the Macedonian siege of the city in the fourth century B.C., but he was given credit for its defeat. In the first century B.C., the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote about the legends surrounding the founding of the island: “Helios (the Sun), the myth tells us, becoming enamored of Rhodos, named the island Rhodes after her and caused the water which had overflowed it to disappear.” It didn’t hurt that the city was the namesake of Helios’s wife, a nymph named Rhodes who was also the daughter of Poseidon. While residents followed the tradition of the day and worshipped many different gods, they had a special place in their hearts for the sun god Helios. Kenneth Lapatin, Curator of Antiquities at the Getty Museum, told The Daily Beast.ĭuring Greek antiquity, Rhodes was known as a center of culture. “I think it’s just interesting that the statue looms so large in the imagination when it stood for a relatively short time and we really know so little about what it looked like, where it stood, or how it was made,” Dr. It was a spectacular sight-the sun god Helios standing tall with one arm holding high a torch-and it made such an impression that it continues to be regarded as one of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World even though, after only 56 years, it came tumbling down in an earthquake leaving nary a sketch behind.

Helios statue replica