COLOSSUS, in antiquity, a term applied generally to statues of great size (hence the adjective "colossal"), and in particular to the bronze statue of the sun-god Helios in Rhodes, one of the wonders of the world, made from the spoils left by Demetrius Poliorcetes when he raised the siege of the city. The sculptor was Chares, a native of Lindus, and of the school of Lysippus. The work occupied him I 2 years, it is said, and the finished statue stood 7o cubits high. It stood near the harbour, but at what point is not certain. As early as the 16th century the belief was current that it had stood across the entrance to the harbour, with a beacon light in its hand and ships passing between its legs. The statue was thrown down by an earthquake about the year 224 B.C. ; then, after lying broken for nearly i,000 years, the pieces were bought by a Jew from the Saracens, and probably reconverted into in struments of war.
Other Greek colossi were the Apollo of Calamis; the Zeus and Herakles of Lysippus ; the Zeus at Olympia, the Athena in the Parthenon, and the Athena Promachos on the Acropolis—all the work of Pheidias.
The best-known Roman colossi are : a statue of Jupiter on the Capitol; a bronze statue of Apollo in the Palatine library; and the colossus of Nero in the vestibule of his Golden House, after wards removed by Hadrian to the north of the Colosseum, where the basement upon which it stood is still visible (Pliny, Nat. Hist., xxxiv. 1 8) .
Gigantic statues of divinities and royalties are characteristic of Egyptian, Assyrian and Indian archaeology, size being an indica tion and measure of social and religious importance.