"What ails you, O Chares?"
A sudden pain in the viscera had made me wince. Soon I was holding my belly and groaning. People helped me out of the banquet hall. I have a blurred remembrance of lying on a couch while the king's head physician bent over me and said:
"He has been poisoned, forsooth. Drink this, Master Chares!"
For two days I hovered on the banks of the Styx. Then I mended and in another ten-day was none the worse. The physician's promptness with an emetic had saved me.
The king made a studious inquiry among the servants of the palace, but nothing did he learn of who had slipped the potion into my victuals. With such a swarm of servitors, it might have been any of fifty people.
Manethôs said: "It is Tis, I have no doubt. When he told us, in the chamber of the Apis bull, that he never forgave a wrong, he meant what he said."
"It's just as well we're sailing soon," I said. "For all the attractions of Alexandria, I don't care to give him another try at me."
The next few years were occupied with the execution of the statue of Ptolemaios the Savior and many smaller commissions, including some from King Seleukos the Victorious. I traveled to his new city of Antiocheia, in Syria. Here my old colleague Eutychides was making a magnificent statue of the Fortune of Antiocheia, in the form of a beautiful seated woman.
I also began to buy materials for the Colossus. I traveled to Cyprus, Kilikia, and Syria for copper and iron. I bought only a little at a time, to keep the price from soaring. Nevertheless, such was the total quantity needed—eight thousand talents of bronze and three hundred of iron—that bronze was scarce and dear for several years around the Inner Sea. My journeys were interrupted by wars, as when King Demetrios, in the fourth year of the 120th Olympiad, fought with King Seleukos for control of the Phoenician cities.
There were also delays over the choice of the site for the Colossus, as several magnates owned land in the foreign quarter and each tried to push me into selecting a site that would profit him.
Moreover, I could not proceed with my main task until the city advanced me enough to pay my workmen. Rhodes could not pay me until King Ptolemaios paid her for the timber, and this money was slow in coming.
Notwithstanding all these good reasons for delay, I had to endure unbridled ridicule from Lykon and his friends for taking so long in getting started. People made jokes about Chares and his never-to-be-finished Colossus as they had in years before about Protogenes' painting of Ialysos.
At last, in the second year of the 121st Olympiad, the site was officially chosen, condemned, and cleared. The following year I subcontracted the pedestal to Makar.
The year after that, when the pedestal was completed, I set up my furnaces on the site and put my crew to work. I employed as many as five hundred men at a time, most of them engaged in moving earth for the mound. This mound grew in the form of a cone, with a spiral path coiling around it to reach a flat working space on the top.
As the mound arose, my crew assembled the three forty-cubit stone columns, fastening the drums together with huge iron cramps set in leaden sockets, and inserting iron braces into holes in the drums. When the braces were in place, the bronze plates of the skin were cast, hammered into shape, and riveted to one another and to the bracing.
As Lysippos had suggested, I made the skin thicker at the bottom. Around the ankles, where the bronzen skin of the god closely surrounded the columns, I cast thick solid sections to give the greatest strength at that point.
As the mound arose, the columns arose above it, then the bracing, then the skin, and then the scaffolding. The first year was occupied in making the feet and ankles alone; the second, in building the legs up to the calves. The third year saw the statue complete to the knees; the fourth, to the crotch. Meanwhile the fall of drapery rose beside the legs.
It was eleven years after I had begun work on the feet of my Helios. This was the second year of the 124th Olympiad, the year in which King Demetrios Antigonou died as a prisoner of King Seleukos. About the same time, Demetrios Phalereus died in Upper Egypt, whither the new King Ptolemaios had banished him.
My men were assembling the bracing for the head and the right arm. This arm presented a difficult problem. I had to extend the scaffolding out at an angle into the air, in order to assemble the iron bracing and then the pieces of bronzen skin. To strengthen this otherwise flimsy structure, I ran a stout iron brace from inside the head, out through a lock of the god's hair, and into his right hand, where it joined the bracing that extended up from the shoulder. The hand was so close to the head that the spectator could not see this connection save from certain limited angles.
One person in Rhodes had certainly profited from the construction. This was Aktis, the waterfront loafer who guided visitors. So many travelers stopped off at Rhodes to see the statue, even before it was finished, that Aktis became prosperous on the fees of those he guided. He now wore a decent shirt, shaved regularly, and bathed at least once a month.
There was not really much for visitors to enjoy at this stage. They saw the mound stretching from the waterfront three plethra inland and towering up more than a plethron in height, like a miniature volcano. A tangle of scaffolding and iron bracing stuck out its top.
One day Kavaros and I were strolling up the spiral path towards the top of the mound, arguing a technical point. (Let me give credit here to Kavaros, to whose vigorous but good-humored foremanship much of the success of the enterprise was due.) I turned at the sound of Aktis' calling my name.
"Hey, Chares! Can I have a word with you?"
I started down the path as Aktis came up, leaving the party he was guiding. When he came close, he spoke in a low voice:
"Say, I thought you ought to know. There was a man in town yesterday trying to hire somebody to kill you."
"What?"
"That's right. He didn't come right out and say: 'I'll pay you to stick a knife in Chares.' Oh, no! He asked about you, and then asked a lot of sly questions about was there a good man in town who could make accidents happen to people. When I told him 'no,' he seemed to think this was an awful dull little town."
"What did he look like?"
"A kind of dried-up little old fellow, very dark, with a big round head. He sounded like he was an Egyptian."
This could well be Tis, allowing for the effect of years. I rewarded Aktis and went to a magistrate with the story. That night the magistrate, a pair of his guards, a couple of men of the night watch, and I made the rounds of the taverns, wineshops, and brothels. But no sign of our man did we see. He must have slipped away on an outgoing ship as soon as he learnt that Rhodians were, by and large, too law-abiding to serve his fell purpose.
Still, the incident gave me pause. I bought a dagger with a broad fourteen-digit blade, a weapon fit for disemboweling an aurochs. I also resolved that if I ever again ran off with another man's wife—which the gods forbid—I would choose one whose husband was not a romantic sentimentalist, full of notions of honor and the duty of vengeance. Or perhaps, I thought, Tis was now too old to enjoy the simpler pleasures of the flesh, so that the only joy remaining him was that of tracking down and killing those who had wronged him years before.
The next year saw the completion of Helios' head and arm and the casting and the gilding of the crown of solar rays. This was the year when old King Lysimachos fell in battle with Seleukos the Victorious, and King Pyrros of Epeiros invaded Italy to help the Tarentines against the Romans.
It was also a year of sadness for me. For one thing, my father died. For several years he and I had been very close. He caught some disease of the lungs during a wet winter and never recovered.