"What for?"
"To give the poor man."
"That liar, faker, and grafter? I should say not! Anyway, you just told me not to give you any of this money until you were on your ship, and that's what I shall do."
Kavaros sighed in his turn. "It is a hardhearted fellow that you are. But perhaps you are right."
The Rhodians were mystified when the Council told them to assemble on the plain south of the city, on the fifth of Hekatombaion. They were more puzzled when the new President commanded:
"Lay hold of those ropes, men! The rest of you go behind the belfry and under it. Place your hands against the crossbeams."
When five thousand Rhodians were clustered around the engine, the President cried: "Now, all together, heave!"
As the earth had been dug away to make a ramp in front of the sunken wheels, the belfry groaned up the gentle slope and began rolling towards the city.
Being one of those commanding the men who pulled and pushed, I was in on the secret. We headed the engine towards the place where the South Gate had stood. It was not hard to maneuver, as the eight huge wheels were mounted on castors and so could be swiveled.
Once the Council was sure that Demetrios had sailed away for good, they had most of the South Wall torn down. It was in such tumbledown condition from the battering of Demetrios' engines that it was cheaper to build a whole new wall than to try to patch the old one. Makar and his masons were already at work on the new wall, but a fifty-cubit gap had been left where the gate had stood. Makar himself was among those pulling. As the machine rumbled towards the city, he cried: "O Chares! Be sure to look inside this thing. Remember what happened to the Trojans!"
A half-hour's pull brought the belfry into the city. We halted inside the ruins of the old wall, on the open plaza.
As the monstrous engine groaned to a stop, old Diognetos stepped forward, wearing the golden crown surmounted by rayed solar disks, which the Council had conferred upon him along with every other honor they could think of. He held up a hand for silence.
"When I undertook to save the city," he rasped, "I demanded this belfry as my share of the spoils. Now that I have it, there is a question of what to do with it. It does not look edible, nor could it easily be turned into a comfortable dwelling house, even by so accomplished an architect as myself. Well then, you will say, why do I not disassemble it and sell the parts? «The timber, iron, and hides must be worth many talents.
"However, I am old. I am comfortably off now, and I do not wish to spend the rest of my days seeking out customers for these materials. Nor have I the true huckster's gift, as has a certain colleague of mine, now happily departed from this land. Therefore, it seems to me that the best thing to do with this monstrosity is to give it to Rhodes. Chares, where is that sign?"
I held up the bronzen placque (which I had cast the day before in the foundry) against the timbers of the base of the belfry, while Diognetos drove two bronze nails through the holes in the ends. Then we stepped back and read:
DIOGNETOS DEDICATED THIS TO THE PEOPLE
FROM THE SPOILS OF WAR
"There you are," said Diognetos. "You do not deserve it after the way you treated me. But," he added, wiping away a tear, "you have suffered for your fault, and I cannot help loving you, at least a little. Let's go."
He tottered off on his stick, amid cheers that shook the blue sky above. Then we swarmed into the belfry to examine it.
Most of the catapults were still in place. Demetrios had provided two sets of stairs, with signs indicating that one was to be used by upward-bound traffic only and the other by descending traffic. Thus was confusion among the crews avoided.
Also, profiting from the loss of Epimachos' previous belfry at Cyprian Salamis, the king, or his engineer, had placed a huge tub of tarred leather on each story, hung about with leathern buckets for fighting fires. This, then, was how the Antigonians had saved their belfry the night we set it afire. What a pity that Demetrios was not satisfied simply to practice engineering! He had made a far better technical man than a king.
When it transpired that the sale of the war materials left by Demetrios would come to scores or even hundreds of talents if shrewdly handled, the Council asked among the citizenry: What to do with this money? Some were for saving it; some, for putting it into defenses; some, for distributing it to the people. As I was now a person of some standing, albeit not a full citizen, the Council also sought my opinion. I said:
"Gentlemen, know that I was not, formerly, a religious man. But several times during the late war I prayed to Helios-Apollon to save us. Each time he responded magnificently. Some of my philosophical friends may tell me that my logic is faulty, but it is good enough for me. As you know, I have returned to the faith of my fathers and joined the Board of Sacrificers of our chief temple.
"Since you ask me what to do with this money, I would honor the true savior of our beloved city by building him a statue: the greatest statue that has ever been erected. I personally swore to Helios-Apollon that if we won the war and I survived, I should urge this plan upon you and devote my life to the building of this memorial."
"Do you mean," said one Councilman, "a statue like the Tarentine Zeus of Lysippos?"
"Oh, no. I would make this one twice as tall—as tall as Demetrios' great belfry, which is about seventy cubits high. Lest the commercial-minded among you hesitate, I might add that from a secular point of view this money were not ill spent. Many cities profit from having some wonder to draw travelers, as the pyramids draw them to Memphis. This statue would spread our fame throughout the world and thereby attract business."
Several ten-days passed while they wrangled. I appeared again and again to repeat my arguments. When the Council adopted my plan and presented it to the Assembly, a citizen named Evarchos read an hour-long speech against the proposal. Since my old antagonist Lykon had written this speech, you can imagine its tenor:
"... Fellow citizens, must we be stupid? Anybody can see that Chares has proposed this plan because he knows that if it be adopted, he will be in a position to secure the contract for himself. Now, we all know what sort of person Chares is: a mere baseborn artisan, and not even a real Hellene; vulgar, quarrelsome, pushing, self-conceited, and implacably ambitious; a climber if ever I saw one. Why, if given a chance, he would make this statue an eidolon of himself, with his own face atop it! If that be his aim, let him do it with his own money, not ours! Shall we bob at the end of this grasping Phoenician's string, like a bait on a fishing line? ..."
However, my friends in the Assembly defended me doughtily. Bias said:
"Look here, Rhodians. We've voted to build statues of Kasandros and Seleukos and Lysimachos. For the Ptolemaios we've voted not only a statue but also a temple. That's all very nice, but if we're going to load these honors on our mortal helpers, we ought to do something special for the immortal one. Someday these Macedonian warlords will all be with the shades, but Helios will still be here when we need him. So it don't make sense to be stingy with the god—"
In the end the proposal passed. There followed months of discussion about the site and the appearance of the statue. At one session of the Council they threw some fantastic proposals at me. One said:
"Let the statue bestride the harbor, with one foot resting on each of two moles, so that ships shall pass between its legs!"
"That were impossible," I said. "Why so?"
"It's a matter of elementary engineering. A statue of this size must be braced by columns of stone, rising through the legs. If the statue straddled the harbor, the legs would rise at a slant, and the columns would not stand up; they would collapse of their own weight. Moreover, the space between the statue's legs would not allow enough clearance for the masts and yards of the larger ships. And, lastly, I should have to close the harbor to traffic. This would ruin our city, since the statue will take years to build."