Though the amphitheater was nicknamed 'Colosseum' after the huge statue erected by Nero in front of the Domus Aurea, it wasn't because of the huge size of either the amphitheater or the statue, which emulated Chares of Lindos famous statue of
Helios. Nero's looked like him, but the Flavians emended that problem, then
Hadrian had it moved.
Commodus put
his own
head on it and made it look like
Herakles (Dio Cassius
LXXII.22.3). But of course it was
Sol, as was its famous prototype at Rhodes,
Helios. Rhodes called it Kolossos, a place name and I suppose a cult name for a
Helios.** It lay in situ, felled by an earthquake, all 32 meters of it (Pliny NH 34.41). So Nero's emulation of it in
Rome was also called Colossus.
Now,
Cornelius Vermeule in
his Cult Images of Ancient
Rome (Bretschneider 1987) illustrates, figs. 41 and 43, alongisde a
TR POT XVIIII (AD 216)
aureus of
Caracalla, a marble statue of "
Caracalla as
Sol" in Raleigh, NC, dated 205 (I suppose from the discernible
inscription on its base?). It was supposed to be
Hadrian who made the statue's
head forever after a
Sol with the features of Alexander, which seems to be what the Raleigh statue represents.
Now,
Cornelius Vermeule may have been puzzled, too, for on p. 41, the only place he talks about the
Sol images (and the book has no
index), he does not discuss the
aureus and the statue at all.
So, when
Forvm had the nice big
Caracalla antoninianus, a TR P XVIII (of 215) with just the same
Sol, I made haste to get it. I have wanted a
Caracalla Antoninianus, a
Sol like that statue and
aureus, and Sol's hand in that gesture for a long time.
For I am sure that the abstracted hand is not (as details, certainly, often are) merely inept.
Vermeule says that
Sol raises
his hand in blessing. Where did he get that? Not
RIC (
Mattingly). Surely
Carson & Hill's 2nd edition of
BMCRE, then. There it is.
For consider the Homeric epithet of Eos: rosy-fingered, rhododaktylos. Surely it is likely that the outstretched hand of the Sun in Chares' great statue of
Helios, and its emulation at
Rome that gave its name to the
Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum), was golden-fingered and beneficent. Or enlightening in several senses, even.
So these coins (there is a
denarius, as well as the
aurei and the
antoninianus) give us the best notion that we can get of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Colossus of Rhodes.
I must write to Raleigh to find out more about their statue.
Vermeule says nothing.
The refs. for my coin are
RIC IV, 264b;
RSC III, 287,
BMCRE V, nos. 135-138 and pl. 71, 2 (most useful and with the 'blessing' mentioned in the text). The ancient references are all in (and indexed in) J. J. Pollitt's Sources & Documents books, The Art of
Greece and The Art of
Rome.
Pat L.
** See below, Reply #11
Click antoninianus to enlarge