A comprehensive study of the statue of the sun god Helios by Chares of Lindos, known as the Colossus of Rhodes, is long overdue. This book, an intellectual excavation of the monument, is the result of a long investigation by Nathan Badoud, who has published extensively on the Colossus and related topics in French and English. His command of the sources is impressive, and this publication appears to present everything there is to know about the statue and its wide context. The material is clearly structured in seven chapters and sections with useful cross-references and indexes. The result is a masterful cultural history of a monument that is as iconic as it is elusive.
In the introduction, Badoud addresses the longstanding neglect of the Colossus by archaeologists because it no longer exists and the incorrect treatment of the available evidence. While taking an interdisciplinary approach to study the Colossus, he advocates that material excavation is only one branch of archaeology—the field can just as well be about reconstructing what is lost. Progress in archaeology, he contends, is achieved through reason, rather than only through new documentation or material evidence.
Chapter 1 traces the rise of the cult of Helios on the island of Rhodes. While Zeus Atabyrios had been the island’s main deity in earlier times, the synoikismos of 408 BCE, when the old cities Ialyssos, Lindos and Kamiros united to found the new town of Rhodes on the north of the island, changed the cultic landscape. It was only then that Helios was chosen as the patron god. He was thus not exactly an ancestral deity, but rather a “political” one.
What a “colossus” was, is the topic of Chapter 2. Badoud disputes the common view that the term always means a statue of enormous size, as seen in derivate terms like κολοσσικός and κολοσσιαῖος. On the basis of the ancient attestations of the term, he establishes that this sense is not original, and that it more likely referred to rigid, immobile statues. The sense of a very big statue, he argues, derives from the Rhodian statue’s fame due to its inclusion in some lists of the Wonders of the World.
Chapter 3 presents the little that is known of the Colossus’ artist Chares of Lindos. Although Chares was mentored by Lysippos, Badoud cautions against assuming stylistic similarities between their works. He also dismantles an old, often repeated theory established by the seventeenth-century historian Johannes van Meurs (Meursius) that the statue had been finished by Laches after Chares committed suicide.
The heart of the book is Chapter 4, titled “The Kolossós of Rhodes”, in which all sources on the date, appearance, construction, and demise of the statue are gathered. As to the production of the statue, Badoud argues that the bronze casting process in courses, described by Pseudo-Philo, is probably authentic, and is well attested for the eighth-century Great Buddha in the Todai-ji temple in Nara, Japan. Although, frustratingly, the sources are too incomplete to allow a full reconstruction of the Colossus, Badoud makes one controversial point clear: despite many later depictions which show the statue straddling the port of Rhodes, the legs were joined. In the ancient tradition, there was much fascination with the statue, as well as confusion: Some later sources on the Colossus of Rhodes seem to identify it with the Colossus of Nero, which stood in that emperor’s Domus Aurea in Rome and was later moved to the environs of the Colosseum, to which it would give its name. The disappearance of the Colossus of Rhodes is often said to have been caused by the Arab pillaging of Rhodes, after which “a Jew from Emesa” would have bought the bronze and taken it away on a caravan of 900 camels. Badoud shows that, although this story has sometimes been taken as authentic, it must be a fabrication by Theophilus of Edessa, an eighth-century astrologer. The story seems to have been inspired by the story in the Book of Daniel about Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the destruction of a statue which portends the demise of the Babylonian Empire.
In chapter 5, Badoud considers the Rhodians’ motivation for constructing the statue. He argues, following earlier suggestions, that the epigram preserved in the Anthologia Palatina (6.171) contains the dedicatory inscription of the statue which once adorned its pedestal. The epigram suggests that the statue celebrates the Rhodians’ rule over sea and land, which refers to the integration of the Peraia on the Anatolian mainland into the state of Rhodes in 304 BCE. According to this interpretation, the Nike of Samothrace would be the counterpoint of the Colossus, because it settled the hostilities begun by the siege of the Peraia in 305/4. The epigram on the base of the Colossus would be echoed by a phrase in Lycophron’s Alexandra that the Romans had “sceptres and monarchy over land and sea”.
Chapter 6 contains an examination of the various theories on the original location of the Colossus. Badoud first rules out proposed locations in the harbor of Rhodes, for which there is no evidence at all; this theory is influenced by post-Antique depictions of the Colossus as straddling the water (as well as the sensational media story of the clairvoyant Ann Dankbaar who had received a vision that remains of the Colossus lay in the harbor’s water). The archaeological site on the acropolis of Rhodes is also excluded, as it was more likely a sanctuary of Apollo and Artemis. Badoud then makes a cogent case that the Colossus once stood at the site of the later Palace of the Grandmaster or its environs, in the current city of Rhodes. From there, it would have been visible from the Anatolian mainland dominated by the island (the Peraia).
Chapter 7, finally, showcases the Colossus’ fascinating reception history. Even if the monument itself was lost, imaginative depictions proliferated throughout the post-Antique period, growing increasingly fanciful over time. False theories and misattributed ancient descriptions have shaped some of these. For example, a pseudoetymology of the word “colossus” as derived from the Latin “colens ossa” (“hiding bones”) created a tradition that the statue contained bones inside. The Colossus was regarded as a column in Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle. A mix-up of the Colossus with another Wonder of the World, the Pharos of Alexandria, even produced depictions of the sculpture with a mirror on its chest and a staircase in its interior. All-important, of course, is Maarten van Heemskerck’s famous illustration of the Colossus straddling the port of Rhodes with his legs apart, with a fire pot and quiver. This depiction, which is clearly influenced by the Apollo Belvedere, found wide reception as far away as in China.
Very welcome here is the exploration of the relation of the Colossus with Auguste Bartholdi’s The Liberty Enlightening the World. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Statue of Liberty was modelled on the Colossus of Rhodes (perhaps specifically as imagined by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, in a harbor setting, holding a firepot and sporting a crown of rays)—but the modern conception of the Colossus itself began to be influenced by the American statue in return. For example, in depictions in the nineteenth century, the Colossus often appears with a lantern, and it has been inaccurately identified as Helios Eleutherios (“of Freedom”). In addition, Badoud notes that the Colossus’ martial context has tended to be neglected due to the liberal values evoked by the statue in New York.
The chapter brims with many other delightful examples of reception: a nineteenth-century Japanese advertisement for an aphrodisiac, on which the Colossus appears in Japanese style, his loincloth torn apart by his erect penis; Salvador Dalí’s painting (1954) showing the Colossus built of bronze plaques, after a theory by Herbert Maryon; and the Colossus’ depiction as a kouros in Sergio Leone’s Il Colosso di Rodi (1961).
If the book has any shortcoming, it lies in the density of its argumentation. The richness and complexity of material occasionally lead to digressions that may challenge the reader. Badoud is harsh on attempts of modern reconstructions: a 2015 project to rebuild the Colossus in Rhodes is called “a monument of both ignorance and deculturization” (p. 217). The excellent illustrations are, fortunately, in full color, but they would perhaps have benefitted from higher-quality printing.
The Colossus may be lost; but this book now offers a captivating journey to discover its meaning, shape, setting, and legacy. It is not only the definitive study of a vanished Wonder, but also a meditation on archaeology itself, revealing “the importance of the unconscious and of the desire in the thinking of archaeologists” (p. 221). As such, it is highly recommended to anyone in the fields of classical archaeology and reception studies.