outh of the port so that
ships sailed between them, as has often been said, although its size was
almost beyond our imagination. The statue was one hundred and five feet
high, and few men could reach around one of its thumbs with their arms,
while each finger was as large as most statues. Twelve years were
occupied in its erection, from B.C. 292 to 280, and it cost three
hundred talents, or about $300,000 of our money, according to its usual
estimate, though there are those who name its cost as more than four
times that amount. The men of Rhodes obtained this great sum by selling
the engines of war which Demetrius Poliorcetes left behind him when he
abandoned the siege of Rhodes in B.C. 303. We have no copy of this
statue, but there are coins of Rhodes which bear a face that is believed
with good reason to be that of the Colossus.

Fifty-six years after its completion, in B.C. 224, the Colossus was
overthrown by an earthquake, and an oracle forbade the restoration of it
by the Rhodians. In A.D. 672, nearly a thousand years after its fall,
its fragments were sold to a Jew of Emesa by the command of the Caliph
Othman IV. It is said that they weighed seven hundred thousand pounds,
and nine hundred camels were required to bear them away. When we
consider what care must have been needful to cast this huge figure in
bronze, and so adjust the separate parts that the whole would satisfy
the standard of art at Rhodes, we are not surprised that it should have
been reckoned among the seven wonders, and that Chares should have
become a famous master.

Chares also founded a school of art which became very important, and,
indeed, it seems to have been the continuance of the school of the
Peloponnesus; for after the time of Lysippus the sculpture of Argos and
Sicyon came to an end, and we may add that with Lysippus and his school
the growth of art in Greece ceased; it had reached the highest point to
which it ever attained, and all its later works were of its decline, and
foreshadowed its death.

The reign of Alexander the Great was so brilliant that it is difficult
to realize that it was a time of decline to the Greeks; and during the
life of Alexander perhaps this does not appear with clearness; but at
the close of his reign there arose such contentions and troubles among
his generals that everything in Greece suffered, and with the rest Greek
art was degraded. In the time of Pericles it was thought to be a crime
in him that he p