Vatican Museums

This group represents a masterpiece by Myron, now lost, which showed the goddess Athena and the Silenus, Marsyas. The myth relates how Athena, having invented the double flute, the aulòs, throws it to the ground in horror because in playing it her face became distorted. Marsyas, attracted by the wonderful sound, tries to take the instrument. The statue of Marsyas dates from the first half of the Ist century A.D. and was found on the Esquiline Hill in 1823. Alongside it is a plaster cast of the Lancellotti Athena used in the mid-19^th century to reconstruct the group statue by Myron which existed around 460 B.C., but which was known only from depictions on coins and reliefs, and from literary sources. There is also another copy of the Marsyas statue in Pentelic marble which was found in Domitian's villa at Castel Gandolfo, and a head, also in Pentelic marble, of Athena from the time of the Emperor Hadrian.