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00:002,500 years ago, a Greek scribe wrote out a dazzling list of wonders.
00:18Sight seen in the mind's eye, he said, can never be destroyed.
00:30To this day, that magic list still haunts the modern world.
01:00Amazingly enough, people still count this lovely old thing as one of the seven modern
01:07wonders of the world. The Golden Gate Bridge, a little rusty now,
01:14more than half a century old, but still, it seems, counted as the best,
01:19counted as simply wonderful.
01:24The Golden Gate Bridge is the oldest bridge in the world.
01:29It was built in the 11th century.
01:34It was built in the 11th century.
01:39It was built in the 11th century.
01:44Great, isn't it?
01:49That's what this series is about. It's about wonder.
01:54It's not about seven old things that hardly exist anymore, not stones and bones.
01:59It's about the archaeology of wonder.
02:02Look at this bridge. It's 50 years old now, and it's certainly not the biggest,
02:07but it still gets to be listed right at the top sometimes of the seven modern wonders of the world.
02:12Why is that?
02:14Well, I think it's because it embodies certain qualities that we so much admire today.
02:20These great spans, they talk of struggle and stress, of human dreaming, human achievement.
02:26That's what the seven wonders are all about.
02:29They were invented at a particular time in history.
02:32It was a time when man was looking around him, looking right through his world,
02:38thinking not what he could do for the gods, but what he could do for himself.
02:43And the seven wonders are a list of man's wonders.
02:47And they've always stayed that way, as a symbol, if you like, of man's power on Earth.
02:53So those buildings, those old things that barely exist, run right through our society.
02:58They're in our cities. They even are in our body image, our own image of ourselves.
03:03Everything that is from the face of God to the body of Jane Fonda.
03:14So what exactly were these seven wonderful things?
03:19The Colossus that rose, they said, upon the Mediterranean isle of Rhodes.
03:30The great Gaudi temple built at Ephesus in Asia Minor.
03:39The great Roman temple built at the foot of Mount Athos.
03:49A towering tomb in a city by the sea, the world's first mausoleum.
04:01The lighthouse called the Pharos, to guide boats to the harbour of Egyptian Alexandria.
04:09An enormous statue of Zeus, king of the gods of Greece and ivory and gold.
04:18And on the far Euphrates, Babylon's fabled hanging gardens.
04:29And always and forever, on every list of wonders, the pyramids of Egypt.
04:34The oldest, largest and most accurate stone buildings ever made.
04:40Echoes of these ancient things are still inside our cities.
04:45At San Francisco, a pyramid stands inside the earthquake zone.
04:54The clock tower and the docks is modelled on the ancient lighthouse.
05:00A hotel is filled with images of hanging gardens built far away.
05:09On the flat plains of Iraq, to please an alien queen.
05:17From Cape Town to Las Vegas, all modern cities have their wonders in them.
05:23The seven ancient wonders are still a part of what a city is.
05:30So where on earth and when did this extraordinary list first see the light of day?
05:40MUSIC
05:52Heidelberg in Germany holds the answer.
05:55Five centuries ago, the pretty little town held an extraordinary treasure.
06:03The greatest collection of ancient books the West has ever known.
06:10Most of it's gone today. It's all been broken up.
06:15There's still a few gems left, though,
06:17conserved here in the library of the university.
06:27You know, that is amazing.
06:30That's one of just a thousand or so old books
06:33that once held most of the wisdom of the West.
06:36You know, my first childhood memory of the Seven Wonders
06:39is sitting with my grandparents.
06:41Looking at a book that was about that big.
06:44And it was a dictionary.
06:46And in the middle of it were these lovely old brown photographs.
06:49The Seven Wonders of the World.
06:51So that's my first memory of the Seven Wonders.
06:54That book is everybody's first memory of the Seven Wonders.
06:58Without that book, we wouldn't have it.
07:01Of course, that book isn't as old as the list that's in it.
07:04This book is only 1,000 years old.
07:07And it came to Europe in the baggage of a cardinal.
07:10It rolled around the continent for 300 or 400 years.
07:13Then it ended up here in the University of Heidelberg.
07:16Now it's so precious, you have to wear gloves and a face mask to look at it.
07:21So, here we go.
07:23The Seven Wonders of the World.
07:25Actually, the wonders are just one of 12 or 14 texts in this book.
07:30And look, there's the beginning of our text.
07:34Philo Byzantium on the Seven Wonders.
07:38Look, that's the introduction.
07:40Here we've got the chapter headings.
07:42There's the first one for the headings.
07:44And the second one for the headings.
07:46And the third one for the headings.
07:48And the fourth one for the headings.
07:50Here we've got the chapter headings.
07:52There's the first one for the hanging gardens.
07:55Here's the second one here for the pyramids.
07:58Here's the third one for the great statue of the Olympian Zeus.
08:02And Phidias, the name of Phidias, its sculptor.
08:06So let's go back to the beginning of these wonders again.
08:09Look at those first lines in the book.
08:11He's telling us...
08:13He's telling us that everybody's heard of these seven wonders.
08:18And nobody has seen them.
08:20For to do so, you have to go on a great journey.
08:22You have to go to the land of Sumer.
08:24You have to go to the land of the Egyptians.
08:26And you have to go to Greece.
08:28So let's, then, start that journey.
08:30Go to the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.
08:34MUSIC CONTINUES
08:47We're sailing out of the port of Halicarnassus,
08:50home of one of the seven wonders,
08:52sailing across the Mediterranean towards several others on.
08:56You know, the seven wonders are a bit like sailors' tales.
09:00Some were well-known things in well-used ports.
09:03Others were out there somewhere,
09:06magic, mystical, garbled memories of things
09:09that nobody had ever really seen.
09:11The sort of things that keep travellers travelling, really.
09:14This, then, is the highway of the ancient world.
09:18There weren't many roads, and what there were were very bad.
09:22So the seven wonders is a story, really,
09:25about things at sea on the highway of the ocean.
09:28I'm going to explain on a map of the sea.
09:30Look, I'll draw you a wonderful map.
09:33Here.
09:35Greece, with its three points.
09:39We go round, up to the Black Sea.
09:43Here's Turkey, swinging round and down,
09:47along the southern coast of the Mediterranean to Egypt.
09:51Now, soon as you've made this map,
09:53the seven wonders start to make some sense.
09:55They're not just seven things.
09:57This is Haley Karnassus, where we've just come from.
10:00Right, the home of the mausoleum.
10:02When the list was made, the mausoleum was 100 years old.
10:05We draw a circle of around 60 miles either side of that.
10:09We get another seven of the seven wonders,
10:11the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
10:14We get another of the seven wonders south,
10:17the great colossus of Rhodes.
10:19You can see that at sea, it was on an island.
10:21And then just 500 miles away,
10:24you'll come to the port of Alexandria
10:26where the pharaohs was another one of the wonders.
10:31The other three, well, they're quite interesting,
10:33if you look at the map, too.
10:35They're a bit like a history lesson.
10:37They're telling you something about the ancient world,
10:39the more ancient world.
10:41That was beside rivers.
10:43So, if you think of the great river Euphrates,
10:46the heartland of the ancient world, running down there,
10:49there's Babylon, one of those sailors' tales that nobody ever saw.
10:53And on the Nile in Egypt, the pyramids.
10:57And in Greece, where two rivers met, Olympia,
11:02the heartland of ancient Greece,
11:04the place where this statue stood, one of the seven wonders,
11:07that seemed to symbolise the nation of ancient Greece itself.
11:11That, then, is where we're sailing,
11:13straight to the heartland of ancient Greece.
11:24Visiting Great Zeus, one of the seven wonders of the world,
11:29was planned like a splendid drama.
11:32Visiting the Parthenon in Athens
11:35still holds something of that drama's opening act.
11:40Phidias, the sculptor, worked here before he made the Zeus.
11:44Here, indeed, he held the dress rehearsal
11:47for that final mighty statue.
11:50So, how did his drama work?
11:52Well, nothing is as simple as it seems.
11:55As you approach, the subtle curve of the temple's steps
11:59gives the building added strength and dignity.
12:02And there are other tricks as well,
12:04all working to produce the same effect.
12:07The surprising end result, and this is the drama's first act,
12:12is that this great temple puts you at your ease.
12:15It seems to smile at you.
12:20I think the single most beautiful thing about the Parthenon
12:24is its scale.
12:26Not its size.
12:27It doesn't overwhelm you, like the seven wonders would have done.
12:31It enfolds you.
12:33It somehow ennobles you.
12:34It makes you feel bigger, like you're walking with the gods.
12:37But it keeps you human.
12:39And the very stones themselves,
12:41But it keeps you human.
12:43And the very stones themselves are beautiful.
12:46They're cut like jewels.
12:48They're warm in the sun and translucent like human skin.
12:54Inside the Parthenon stood the second act.
12:57Phidias's huge statue of Athena,
13:00made ten years before he made the Zeus.
13:03It was as high as the Restorer's Crane.
13:06There's nothing left now, though.
13:11To see something of Phidias's magic, then,
13:14to see the drama's second act,
13:16you must go somewhere else.
13:29To the city they call the Athens of the South.
13:32To Nashville, Tennessee.
13:42That's the trick, then.
13:44That's the surprise that Phidias designed
13:47for the visitors who came to see the great Athena
13:50and his Zeus of ivory and gold.
13:52It's a trick of scale,
13:54and it comes over very clearly in this reconstruction.
13:57That statue standing in Athena's hand
14:00is as big as a person.
14:04First, you're calmed and reassured by the temple's exterior.
14:09Then you're pushed into the uncertain darkness,
14:12into the frightening presence of a huge and towering god.
14:17It's a piece of pure theatre,
14:20used by Phidias to set an aura of reverence,
14:23of fear, of faith and wonder around his statue.
14:28Judging by its ancient fame,
14:30the place where the trick worked best of all
14:33was the temple of Zeus at Olympia in southern Greece.
14:39BIRDS CHIRP
14:44The athletes of the ancient Olympic Games
14:47went into the stadium through this archway.
14:54Male Greeks competed here for 1,300 years and more.
14:58The sacred games of Zeus.
15:03These footprints mark the place where a victor's statue stood.
15:093,000 of them,
15:12clustered round the altars and temples of almighty Zeus.
15:24The columns mark the buildings of the ancient Olympic village.
15:29BIRDS CHIRP
15:35Here, athletes and spectators made offerings together
15:40and they walked up the steps of Zeus' temple
15:43to see one of the wonders of the world.
15:51This was the heart of their culture,
15:54the grandest single figure of the ancient Greeks.
15:59Zeus' skin was made of plates of ivory,
16:03his hair of gold.
16:10Behind it stood the sacred veil from the temple in Jerusalem,
16:14taken in plunder.
16:16In front of it, a huge, shallow pool of olive oil reflecting light.
16:20And for all that time, whilst the statue stood,
16:24men came and polished the ivory,
16:26a special body of men called Phidias's Polishers.
16:29The statue was much loved.
16:31One visitor said,
16:33''I can give you the measurements of this statue, but not its effect.''
16:38Another visitor, Philo of Byzantium, who wrote upon the seven wonders,
16:43said, ''The other six wonders we honour, but Zeus we venerate.''
16:48Why? Why did this statue generate such deep emotion?
16:54Well, the answer was in its face, its beautiful, polished ivory face.
16:59''Phidias,'' says one critic, ''has given us the face of God.
17:03''He has added to religion.''
17:05And, of course, Phidias had made his god in the image of a man.
17:10And so, by making a new god, he had made a new man.
17:14And no artist really can do anything more than that.
17:18The statue's gone today,
17:20but, amazingly, the workshop where it was made still stands.
17:25A strongroom whose massive walls protected the tunnelmore of gold
17:30the craftsmen used to make the statue,
17:33and the vast quantities of ivory tusks as well.
17:36Here, you see something of Phidias the perfectionist.
17:42His workshop was built at precisely the same angle to the sun
17:46as was the temple.
17:48Phidias could see exactly how the light from the temple door
17:51would fall upon his statue.
17:53Here, then, he probably planned that pool of oil
17:57to reflect light up into the statue's face.
18:01The entire workshop is exactly the same size as the room in the temple.
18:07How precisely Phidias planned that dazzling change of scale around the Zeus.
18:12Such care, such perfection.
18:18The little site museum at Olympia has an entire case
18:22from the excavation of Phidias's studio,
18:25and these belong to Phidias.
18:28There's a little cup there that actually has scratched on the bottom of it,
18:32''I belong to Phidias.''
18:34This is his coffee mug.
18:36As for the rest, well, these are the tools and materials
18:40that produced one of the seven wonders of the world.
18:43Look, here's the ivory and bone that was the skin of the great statue.
18:48You can still see the saw marks on it,
18:50and these, well, these are the chisels and drills which cut the ivory
18:54and drilled it so that it would plate and hang over the wood.
18:59This little hammer here is very interesting. It's a jeweller's hammer.
19:03This was used on the cast gold.
19:05These moulds along the bottom were either used to cast gold in,
19:09which was then tapped exactly into shape,
19:11or perhaps to stretch ivory across.
19:14The ancient Greeks had a mysterious way of stretching and bending ivory.
19:19You know, when visitors come here and look at this case,
19:22I think the thing that most amazes me
19:24You know, when visitors come here and look at this case,
19:27I think the thing that most amazes them
19:29is the tininess of the materials and the tininess of the tools.
19:33I mean, this is really strange.
19:35The world's biggest indoor statue made with these tiny tools.
19:39The truth is, of course, they're jewellery equipment.
19:42The world's largest statue was made like a jewellery.
19:48The end came with the Christians.
19:51In the fourth century,
19:53Zeus' Olympic Games were stopped by order of the Christian emperors.
19:58Phidias' studio was made into a church.
20:01Old Greece had gone.
20:07The great temple had already fallen,
20:09its columns tumbled in an earthquake,
20:12its stone plundered to build a fortress against barbarian invaders.
20:17As the classical world was abandoned,
20:20the local rivers filled with yellow silt.
20:23And this it was that smothered the ruins of Olympia,
20:27preserving Phidias' tools and cup for us.
20:40Zeus' great statue had been carried off,
20:43taken away to Istanbul, or Constantinople, as it was then called.
20:48In the days of the first Christian emperors,
20:51the city on the Golden Horn
20:53held one of the most extraordinary gatherings of art
20:56the world has ever seen.
20:58This brick circle marks the entrance of the palace
21:01of the pious Christian eunuch, Lausus.
21:05He oversaw the closing of the temples.
21:08He collected pagan sculptures and stood them in his palace.
21:15The city of Phidias,
21:17the city of Olympia,
21:19the city of Phidias,
21:21the city of Phidias,
21:23the city of Phidias,
21:25he stood them in his palace.
21:29The greatest prize of all stood at the end of the hall,
21:33the 800-year-old statue of Zeus.
21:37It stood there in a niche like the end of a church,
21:40as high as those trees.
21:44Here it stood for 60 years or so.
21:48Then it was destroyed in a city riot.
21:51In one way, though, it's still here to this day,
21:54for the great face of Phidias is Zeus,
21:57became the face of Christ omnipotent
22:00throughout the Eastern Church.
22:08This is the little church of St Saviour in Kora in Istanbul,
22:12one of the most beautiful Byzantine monuments that survives,
22:16a theological jewel basket.
22:19And here's great Zeus on its walls.
22:22Zeus as Christ,
22:241,000 years after the ivory original burned to ash in Lausus Palace.
22:29There's St Peter there, holding the keys of heaven.
22:33He's always shown like that.
22:35He's a man with a roundish face,
22:38long curly hair and a short blonde beard.
22:42Now, look at St Paul.
22:45He's always shown like that, completely different.
22:48Thinning hair, high-domed forehead,
22:50long straggly beard and a great hooked nose.
22:53So anybody who came in the church would have known who they were
22:56from their traditional portraits alone.
22:58Now, look up the top.
23:00Seated on his throne, the Olympian Zeus as Christ.
23:08How on earth was it, though,
23:10that a pagan god came to stand as the very image of Christ?
23:16Well, for one thing, the Olympian Zeus in Lausus Palace
23:22was a very wonderful thing in its own right.
23:26And for another, that same statue had already stood
23:30as an image of supreme divinity for almost 1,000 years.
23:47MUSIC CONTINUES
24:04Bacchus, the god of wine, Aphrodite, the goddess of love,
24:09will both dissolve your limbs, the ancient poet says,
24:13as will their only child, the gout.
24:18You know, lying here in this lovely old Turkish bath
24:22is actually a direct descendant of Greek and Roman baths.
24:26I can't help thinking how everybody else
24:29looks nothing like a Greek sculpture.
24:32And yet, you know, that idea of Greek sculptures and Roman sculptures
24:36representing somehow the ideals of physical beauty
24:40is still in us today.
24:42It's a long way from the truth, of course.
24:45You know, a little while ago, there was a research project
24:48that measured thousands of Italian and Greek airmen.
24:51And they measured them against classical statues, and guess what?
24:55They were nothing like the same at all.
24:57And, again, if you're in Mediterranean lands
25:00and you see women who've worked in fields all their lives,
25:03they look more like Roseanne than they do like Madonna.
25:06And yet this idea in us that somehow there's this classical figure
25:11trying to get out is still very strong.
25:14It's aerobics and slimming and all the rest of it.
25:17Where on earth, then, did this amazing ideal of classical beauty come from
25:22and why is it still with us?
25:28The short answer, of course, is Greek sculpture.
25:32Its ancient images are still alive in us.
25:36Sculptors like Phidias had fixed the basic body image
25:40with statues like the Zeus.
25:43In the centuries that followed, though,
25:46sculpture became more animated,
25:49what many Westerners would still call more natural.
26:06Sculptures of women took on the looks and glances
26:09that are still today called sexy.
26:20And men went into lifelike action.
26:26Bestriding the entrance of a harbour,
26:29the legendary Colossus, the other statue of the Seven Wonders,
26:33became a famous image of this brand-new mobile type of sculpture.
26:38Above all, this was an image created by artists
26:42working on the portraits of a single man,
26:45Alexander the Great.
26:47Look at that wrinkle on Alexander's forehead.
26:50It's quite real, isn't it?
26:52Like he just furrowed his brow.
26:54The hair, too. It's like there's wind blowing through it. It's all rough.
26:58Like real hair, you might think.
27:00Like this cheek, too.
27:02Get down here and really look at it.
27:04You can see the sculptor's actually made four different movements across the face.
27:09One for the cheekbone, one for the nose, one for the mouth, another for the chin.
27:13He's really interested in skin, this guy.
27:15He's interested in skin stretching over the muscle.
27:19You get the feeling that if a fly settled on this marble...
27:23..it would twitch.
27:25Alexander changed history.
27:28That's why this new type of sculpture is so appropriate.
27:32He changed history when he marched from Macedonia to India.
27:36He actually put human affairs at the front.
27:39There was a time when you could say that was before Alexander's conquest and after.
27:43Alexander had become a man of destiny in time.
27:52A man of destiny, of course, is an image.
27:55It's not a copy of flesh and bone.
27:59Just as Hitler had Leni Riefenstahl, just as Garbo had Hollywood,
28:04so Alexander has his image-maker.
28:07He had a sculptor, a court sculptor, called Lysippos,
28:11and he invented the first image of man as hero.
28:16He did a lot for Alexander.
28:18One thing he did was to get the gentle curves of Greek sculpture
28:23and really throw them about.
28:25You can see his torso is going down, he's going across.
28:28It's a real man of vim and vigour here.
28:31This muscle, which shows that Alexander was a pretty powerful javelin thrower,
28:36has been accentuated so it clamps down on the thigh.
28:39But the biggest thing he did
28:41was to decrease the traditional size of the Greek head.
28:44That normally fitted into the body by about 7 or 8 to 1.
28:49Lysippos made it 10 to 1.
28:51Alexander's head got smaller.
28:53He ended up looking more like an American football player
28:56or Schwarzenegger or something.
28:59Lysippos really did a number on the face, though.
29:03And he's made us a modern hero.
29:05I mean, this guy could go straight into the movies, couldn't he?
29:08It's a very strange story about how this particular look came about
29:12because the real Alexander was truly long-haired, it seems,
29:16but rather short and a little deaf.
29:18So when he was surrounded by his courtiers,
29:20his typical pose was of actually slightly straining
29:23to hear what was going on above him.
29:25What Lysippos did, the classic icon-maker,
29:28was to turn these defects into heroic poses.
29:32So the slight craning, the twist,
29:34was turned into a pose as if he was directing armies.
29:38And, of course, that has caused the mouth to curl slightly and open a little.
29:42What Lysippos made for us here
29:45is really the first image of a star.
29:50Bits of this will survive in every star's picture,
29:53from Byron to Brando to the dying James Dean.
30:00What moved these ancient artists
30:02as they made the first images of modern heroes?
30:06As they showed Alexander fighting, riding and hunting?
30:10As they cast the Colossus of Rhodes,
30:12which, after all, was made by a pupil of Lysippos
30:16was nothing more or less than a 110-foot ad for the brand-new man.
30:23Go to the great eastern cities
30:25built by Alexander's generals and successors,
30:28built in the Hellenistic age,
30:30and you'll enter the world of the Seven Wonders.
30:36Walk through these same great cities
30:39and you walk through the minds of the first modern people.
30:47I'm strolling up the High Road to Pergamum,
30:52one of the grandest cities of the Hellenistic East.
30:56These cities were completely incredible.
30:59Amongst other treasures,
31:01they had examples of all the Seven Wonders in them,
31:04from colossal statues to the Founder's Tomb.
31:08Pergamum, uniquely perhaps, lacked a lighthouse.
31:11It didn't need one, of course.
31:13It was nowhere near the sea.
31:15It had its own technological wonder, though.
31:18That was a 33-mile-long system of pipes
31:21that brought icy water from the top of a mountain
31:24to the heart of the city.
31:26It was a real technological wonder.
31:28This here is just a part of the outflow.
31:32This is really a river they've diverted.
31:34And look, there's the name of the potter.
31:38Still on the pipe.
31:41Now, this Hellenism, this age of Hellenism,
31:46people usually don't regard it very highly.
31:49Even the word Hellenism is pejorative.
31:52It means sort of like the Greeks.
31:55Now, think of ancient history.
31:57We are generally told that the beginnings of the modern world
32:00start in the Classical period, right?
32:02By that, they mean two things.
32:04On the one hand, they mean the ancient Greeks,
32:07as wise as ours, in beautiful white togas,
32:09building the Parthenon, thinking beautiful thoughts
32:12and generally rolling around the islands of Greece.
32:15On the other hand, a few hundred years later, the Romans pop up.
32:18Much more interesting, very cruel.
32:20Interesting party throwers.
32:22And they also throw a few Christians to the lions and things.
32:25Between those two polarities, however, is Hellenism.
32:30And that really is the heart of the Seven Wonders.
32:33Hellenism is the first modern age.
32:35The Seven Wonders, after all, are a range of aspirations
32:38and achievements of human imagination.
32:41This Hellenistic age is the first money economy.
32:44It's the age which really gave Rome its impetus and start.
32:48And also in the east, after a few hundred years,
32:51we'd see the birth of Christianity.
32:58The real wealth of the windy city of Pergamon
33:02could be seen from 50 miles away in the plain.
33:06There was a great column of black smoke
33:09which went up from the centre of this building.
33:12This was the great altar of Pergamon,
33:15the place where all the farm animals
33:18were slaughtered for the population to eat.
33:21The smoke, of course, was their bones and sinew burning,
33:25offered on the altars to the gods,
33:27and the smoke went up for century after century
33:30in this booming town.
33:42The altar's gone now,
33:44blasted out of the hill of Pergamon in Turkey
33:47in the 1870s by a German railway engineer
33:50and carried off to Europe.
34:00This, then, is what they've reconstructed in Berlin.
34:04They started making this about 180 years before Christ.
34:08Had it started 50 years earlier,
34:10it certainly would have been one of the Seven Wonders.
34:13It was that famous.
34:15As it is, it just made it into the Bible as the throne of Satan.
34:20This, of course, is what people come to see,
34:23the magnificent frieze that went right round the whole building.
34:27It tells a story.
34:29It tells a story of how the gods,
34:32these marvellous, implacable, rule-giving figures,
34:36fought the giants who used to run the world and won.
34:40The giants are losers.
34:42They're twisted, they're in agony.
34:45They're really the root of modern art.
34:47Everything from Francis Bacon to Robocops here.
34:50And some of them look like this man.
34:53Look at him. That's Alexander.
34:55His head's slightly turned, his mouth is a little open,
34:58that's why he's a human hero,
35:00caught in the hands of the gods and he's suffering.
35:05Here, the world that made the Seven Wonders
35:08is not listing its achievements,
35:11just telling us about the brutal struggle to achieve.
35:15You feel like you're in a Roman arena,
35:18watching gladiators and wild animals killing each other.
35:22The nerves are at full stretch.
35:25The drapery licks around the figures like fire.
35:28There's Helios, the same god as the Colossus,
35:31racing in frenzy in his chariot across the sky.
35:36The Colossus of Rhodes, though, stood somewhere between this frenzy
35:41and Phidias' calm images of Zeus.
35:44What was it really like?
35:47Out to sea, wrote Philo of Byzantium,
35:50out to sea lies the island of Rhodes
35:53which the sun raised into the light.
36:02Here, ancient writers say, once stood the great Colossus,
36:06the second sun standing face to face with the first.
36:11It was made about 280 BC by the sculptor Caris,
36:16one of Lysippos' pupils.
36:18Though it fell down after only 60 years,
36:21they say it was just as impressive as a ruin.
36:26Finally, the fallen statue was broken up by Arab soldiers
36:30and sold in Syria for $10,000.
36:34Finally, the fallen statue was broken up by Arab soldiers
36:38and sold in Syria for scrap.
36:41In modern times, no-one's seen a trace of it.
36:49Classical scholars say the statues like the Colossus
36:53usually stood beside a temple.
36:55At Rhodes, Helios' temple stood on the hilltop in the middle of the town,
37:00but they've not found a trace of the Colossus there.
37:04They did uncover a single vital clue, though.
37:08Huge city walls from the time of the Colossus
37:11running through the town and down into the port.
37:15These prove that Rhodes' harbours are largely artificial.
37:19This means that a colossal figure
37:21might well have been built on the end of this brand-new harbour wall,
37:25just as they were in other ancient man-made harbours.
37:31The Colossus couldn't have possibly spanned the harbour entrance, though,
37:35as pictures of it show.
37:37It would have had to have been a quarter of a mile high for that,
37:41and neither the metal nor the stone of such a giant striding statue
37:45could ever sustain such massive strains,
37:48nor the force of winter gales.
38:01Today, the medieval fortress of St Nicholas
38:05stands at the end of the harbour wall.
38:08It's half made of ancient masonry.
38:31You know, the most interesting thing in this little fortress
38:35are these blocks of marble.
38:37If you look at them very, very closely,
38:40you can see they were first cut by Greek sculptors,
38:43ancient Greeks from the time of the Colossus of Rhodes.
38:46Of course, the medieval people have taken the marble
38:49and reused them about the place.
38:51This one, for example, has had a great slot cut in it
38:54to take the planks of a drawbridge.
38:56The most interesting thing about these blocks is that they're not square.
39:00They're actually segments of a 17-metre circle.
39:04Each one's got a very slight curve on it.
39:07Now, 17 metres is the exact dimensions
39:10of this little tower at the centre of the fortress.
39:13So what looks like has been happening here
39:15is that the medieval people took over an ancient building,
39:18perhaps even built straight onto the foundations,
39:20and jumbled all these ancient stones up.
39:23These, then, may be fragments of the very base of the Colossus of Rhodes.
39:31What, then, did the real Colossus look like?
39:34And how was it ever made?
39:36Philo, who lived when the Colossus still stood,
39:40says that it was built like a house.
39:43Fragments of other giant statues
39:46show that they were built as skilfully as Phidias's Zeus,
39:50bit by bit, on frames of iron and stone.
39:54The skin of the Colossus was cast in sheets of bronze.
40:03As for its pose, the truth is,
40:06we don't know if it was standing up, sitting down,
40:09or even driving a chariot.
40:11Chances are, though, there's a hint of it in statues like these.
40:17A standing bronze with some of the life and grace
40:21of Lysippos' finest work for Alexander.
40:29This marble giant is a copy of another Colossus,
40:33one made by Lysippos himself.
40:36The Colossus of Rhodes, though,
40:38was not tired and overblown like this poor old Hercules,
40:42but a young man with a handsome face,
40:45and that gives us another clue.
40:50This beautiful head was found on the island of Rhodes.
40:54Now, the first interesting thing, as far as we're concerned,
40:58these holes that run around the back of his head,
41:01there's a whole lot of them,
41:03and if you should stick a wire
41:05or a bronze piece of metal covered in gold in them,
41:09you'd find they made a perfectly symmetrical burst
41:12like the rays of the sun,
41:14the rays around the head of the Statue of Liberty,
41:17or, indeed, around the statue of the god Helios.
41:20He always wore a sunburst.
41:22So this, then, is the head of a statue of Helios,
41:27the god of the Colossus from the city of Rhodes.
41:30And within 100 years or so, it's the same date as the Colossus.
41:35Let's look at the face for a minute.
41:37Look at that slightly open mouth, the twisting neck, the open eyes.
41:42That's Alexander.
41:44That's the same school of sculptors that made the Colossus,
41:47made that image of the king, and it goes right through the world.
41:51Now, this Helios, he's rather an interesting god.
41:55He's not a Greek god, really. He's Asian.
41:58And he came to power, really, in the great cities of the East,
42:01in the Hellenistic cities like Pergamum and Rhodes.
42:05Now, this eastern god, just like Jesus Christ, another eastern god,
42:10goes from these eastern cities straight to Rome and the heart of the empire.
42:23If you go to modern Rome,
42:25you'll still find images of the ancient sun god.
42:29When Christianity was beginning,
42:31the links between the eastern gods were very close.
42:36Just like Christ, Helios the sun god was also the god of judgement
42:41who cast sinners from the light.
42:44And Helios too was born on December the 25th,
42:48and we still worship on Sunday, the day of Helios.
42:53MUSIC PLAYS
43:02Still today, deep in the church under the altar of St Peter's,
43:06there are memories of Helios in some of the oldest images of Christ.
43:14In an ancient catacomb close by St Peter's tomb,
43:17a gold mosaic shows us Christ as Helios rising in his chariot.
43:22This risen Christ has Alexander's twisting neck and straggling hair
43:26and slightly opened mouth.
43:29And the fiery flames that once flicked around the head of the Colossus
43:33have become a Christian halo.
43:36Here, then, echoes of the ancient wonders enter the Christian world.
43:43And still today, our modern cities are filled
43:46with half-images of Zeus and the Colossus,
43:49and all of them as all of us modelled on those splendid ancient images
43:53of ivory and bronze and gold.
43:56MUSIC PLAYS
44:12MUSIC CONTINUES
44:42MUSIC FADES