Gilded Bronze Statue of Hercules

Rome's cattle market, the Forum Boarium, lay by the Tiber below the Palatine, and it belonged to Hercules. Legend said he had rested the cattle of Geryon there on his way back from the far west and killed Cacus, the fire-breathing thief who stole some of them, and the great altar where traders paid him a tithe, the Ara Maxima, stood nearby. This gilded bronze, nearly two and a half metres tall, was found in that area under Pope Sixtus IV, between 1471 and 1484, among the remains of a round building that was destroyed in the same digging.

The museum sees it as the cult statue of a round temple of Hercules built in the 2nd century BC, and that temple is often identified with one dedicated by Scipio Aemilianus, the general who destroyed Carthage. The body follows Greek models of the 4th century BC, close to Lysippus, the court sculptor of Alexander the Great, and a recent hypothesis suggests it may have been cast directly from a mould taken from a Greek bronze of that time. He holds his club in his right hand and the apples of the Hesperides in his left, and his short hair is bound with a wreath of olive.