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.
Book information
DOWN THE TWISTED RIVER
he traveled, deep into the darkness of Egypt, seeking the stolen treasure that would buy his city's freedom.
At last, in the house of the murderous archthief of Egypt, dealer in plunder and death, his journey ended—and a nightmare of love began.
For there he met the fiery Amenardis, the dark, haunting woman of every man's dreams, and learned a truth that would torment him all his years—no man could ever sate the strange hunger that drove this woman!
"The exploding ancient world in all its wild vigor and splendor."
New York Herald Tribune
THE BRONZE GOD OF RHODES
BY L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP
This low-priced Bantam Book has been completely reset in a type face designed for easy reading, and was printed from new plates. It contains the complete text of the original hard-cover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
the bronze god of rhodes
A Bantam Book / published by arrangement
with Doubleday & Co., Inc.
Printing History
Doubleday edition published January 1960
2nd printing December 1959
Bantam edition published July 1963