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.