Colossus

Colossus (Gk. a statue), often applied in Greek to gigantic statues like those in Egypt. In the Macedonian period especially, colossal statues were erected in various parts of Greece. The best known, was the Colossus of Rhodes, a bronze statue of Apollo by Chares of Lindos, 70 cubits or about 107 feet high. There is no foundation for the view that it was placed astride of the entrance to the harbour. A winding staircase led to the top. It took twelve years to set up, was hollow, and steadied with pillars of stone. Erected about 280 B.C., it was upset by an earthquake thirty-five years later, and lay on the ground till the middle of the 7th century A.D., when it was sold by a Mohammedan general to a Jew as old metal. The statues of Athene on the Acropolis at Athens and of Zeus Olympius, some 40 feet high, were hardly of colossal dimensions. In modern times the great statue of Hercules at Cassel, the statue of Arminius at Detmold, that of St. Carlo Borromeo (1697) at Arona on the Lago Maggiore (70 feet high on a 42-feet pedestal), and that of Liberty by Bartholdi on an island in New York Bay, are the most important colossal statues.