Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
So Shakespeare apparently thought he did.
The Colossus at Rhodes was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. And some people claim, at least part of his claim to fame, was that he literally bestrode or straddled the harbor at Rhodes (which if true, would be an amazing accomplishment even today).
Anyways, this is a purely factual question. Did he or didn’t he bestride the harbor?
Thank you in advance for all your kindly replies:).
:):):)
No, impossible.
From contemporary accounts the statue was around 30 metres tall. Here’s a statuethat’s about the same size (32 m). You aren’t getting any ships in between those legs.
The Shakespeare quote doesn’t actually read like it advocates straddling the harbour to me, or surely we would be swimming under his huge legs, not walking?
Is there any cite that suggests that it “straddled the harbor at Rhodes”?
According to Wikipedia, the structure stood on a 15-metre-high (49-foot) white marble pedestal near the Mandraki harbour entrance. Other sources place the Colossus on a breakwater in the harbour.
As the Wikipedia article observes:
I don’t know of any ancient source that says or suggests that the statue straddled the harbor. I’ve seen artwork showing this, but that’s all post-Medieval.
Certainly the image is striking. The 1961 Sergio Leone film Colossus of Rhodes has the statue straddling the harbor entrance (The statue also holds a bowl of burning material that it releases onto a ship passing beneath). The statue is depicted straddling the harbor on posters for the film.
Ray Harryhausen echoed the colossus in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), when the bronze giant Talos straddles the harbor to block and grab the Argo.
In the HBO series Game of THrones, based on Martin’s books, they depicted the Titan of Braavos straddling the harbor, as the Colossus was held to have done. They even showed it in the opening animation.
Constructing a statue on two relatively thin legs at an angle that could support the weight of the torso and even the relatively thin bronze “skin” of the Colossus really would have been beyond the capability of engineers at the time. An interesting fictional account of its construction is The Bronze God of Rhodes by L. Sprague de Camp, a historical and sf/fantasy writer who wrote the classic nonfiction book The Ancient Engineers, so he knew what he was writing about.
CalMeacham:. Thanks for the link to the very enjoyable Ancient Origins article. I was especially delighted by the author’s hypothesis that Talos really existed, and was some kind of space alien.
Sounds dinghy to me, too.
There is a vast range of theories and beliefs that constantly inspire wonder.
But I was just posting for the picture.
Regarding Talos, by the way, Harryhausen’s interpretation of him as a giant statue has colored our beliefs about him. I’m sure Ray took the Colossus of Rhodes as his inspiration, and he really likes those photogenic giant things. But most ancient sources about Talos don’t imply that he was a giant. artwork depicts hi as human-sized:
Yes, but Hi wasn’t made of bronze and human-sized. Talos was.
Hi changed his appearance through the life of the strip. He started out as a slim, typical; “TV Dad”. At one point he had a broken nose
You’re wondering exactly how similar the Titan of Braavos is to the Colossus of Rhodes, aren’t you?
Side question: are there any (recognizable) left over parts of the COR laying around?
The wiki indicates that they lay on the ground after a great earthquake for many years until muslims melted the statue down and sold the bronze to “a Jew”. The more things change the more they remain the same! I have my doubts about the veracity of that story.
It’s actually more likely that it was sold to Julius Caesar, who was looking for some kind of gift to get him in bed with Cleopatra.
That’s a ‘Seven Wonders of the World’ woosh- see ‘Library of Alexandria’
You really think not? Here’s an artist’s conception of the Colossus of Rhodes. As you can see, his feet are not planted in the rocks at the mouth of the harbor; he’s elevated on twin towers, each about 40 feet off the ground. His crotch is an additional 40 feet above the water (so 80 feet above the water), and his legs appear to be spread at about a 40[sup]o[/sup]; this places his feet at an approximate distance of 2[40 x (tan20)] which my calculator tells me is about 29 feet. Is 29 feet a particularly narrow beam for ships that sailed in the 4th century BCE? The submarines I served aboard 2400 years later only exceeded that by about 2 feet!
The engineering problems inherent to the construction of such a statue (especially at that point in history) are, admittedly, knotty.* But so are those inherent in the erection of the (somewhat) contemporaneous Pyramids in Egypt, the more contemporaneous Stonehenge and the less contemporaneous Chichen Itza. And the Jai Hanuman statue isn’t even attempting to present a particularly wide stance.
Perhaps we shouldn’t squabble over niggling details.
*Maybe geysers came into play in that proje-- OUCH! Who threw that?
Did your submarine have banks of oars?
Plus with wind and currents, the leeway needed for an unmotored ship is far higher.
The “knotty engineering problem of the Pyramids” is “There are many ways they could have done this, but we don’t know which exact one of those many ways they used”. The “knotty engineering problem of the bestriding Colossus” is “There’s no way they could have done that”. Completely different.
