The Colossus of Rhodes (ancient Greek Κολοσσὸς Ῥόδιος, lat. Colossus Rhodius) is a giant statue of the ancient Greek sun god Helios, which stood in the port city of Rhodes, located on the island of the same name in the Aegean Sea, in Greece. One of the Seven Wonders of the World. The work of the famous Rhodian school of sculpture. It stood for a little over half a century until it was destroyed by an earthquake.

After the collapse of the power of Alexander the Great, Ptolemy entrenched himself in Rhodes. After his establishment in Egypt, he entered into an alliance with Rhodes, controlling trade in the eastern Mediterranean. In 305 BC. e. the son of Antigonus the One-Eyed Diadochus, Demetrius of Macedon, landed on Rhodes with forty thousand troops. After keeping the main city of the island under siege for a whole year, despite the construction of many siege weapons, he was forced to retreat. Around 294-282 BC. e. in honor of the siege heroically sustained by the Rhodians, the inhabitants of the city decided to erect a statue.

To do this, the citizens of Rhodes decided to sell the siege weapons abandoned by the enemy and to build a statue of the sun god Helios, revered by them, to thank him for his intercession. Helios was not just a particularly revered deity on the island - according to legend, he was its creator himself: without a place dedicated to him, the sun god carried the island on his hands from the depths of the sea.

The colossus stood for just over 50 years, until the Rhodes earthquake, which occurred in 226 or 227 BC, destroyed the statue. e. The Egyptian king Ptolemy III offered to pay for the restoration of the statue, but the Delphic oracle forbade this, so as not to anger the god Helios. As a result, the Rhodians, in fear of the deity, obeyed the divination, and the statue remained lying on the ground.

As Strabo writes, in his time "the statue lay on the ground, overthrown by an earthquake and broken at the knees." But even then, the Colossus was surprising for its size. Pliny the Elder mentions that only a few could grasp the statue's thumb with both hands.

The fragments of the colossus were at the site of the fall for more than eight centuries, until, finally, in 653, the Arabs, led by the commander Muawiyah I, captured Rhodes. The new owners of the island sold the fragments of the ancient statue to a Jewish merchant from Edessa, who, according to one of the chronicles of Theophanes the Confessor, melted them on the spot and took them out, loading 900 camels with bronze ingots.