Bust of Commodus as Hercules

On the last night of 192 Commodus was strangled in his bath by Narcissus, an athlete he trained with, in a plot hatched inside his own household. The Senate condemned his memory, and his images were pulled down. This one survived underground. It was found in 1874 in a buried room of the Horti Lamiani, imperial gardens on the Esquiline, together with the two Tritons, sea gods, that had flanked it, and the museum thinks someone had tried to hide it.

It shows him as he wanted to be seen in his last years. He had himself called Hercules, son of Zeus, appeared in public with a lion skin and a club, and renamed all 12 months after his own titles, among them Herculeus and Amazonius. Here the lion's head covers his own like a hood, the club is in his right hand and the golden apples of the Hesperides, prize of one of the hero's labours, are in his left. Beneath the bust a kneeling Amazon, one of an original pair, holds a horn of plenty beside a globe marked with signs of the zodiac.