In the 18th century a marble bust representing the Minotaur was housed in Palazzo Barberini near the Quattro Fontane. It was subsequently bought and restored by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and finally ended up in the Vatican Museums. On the basis of inventories it is possible to establish its provenance from Villa Barberini to Castel Gandolfo, which stood above the ruins of the Albanum Domitiani. Housed in the antiquarium of the present-day papal villa is the torso of a youth, a copy from an original whose replicas have already been interpreted as parts of groups from the Flavian age representing the myth of the Minotaur (Athens, Rome). Is it possible, with these two fragments, to reconstruct a similar group in the villa of Domitian? The struggle between Theseus and the Minotaur appears to
have been a subject particularly admired by Domitian, who in the Domus Flavia had a fountain built in the form of a labyrinth, at whose centre a group of the same subject may be hypothesized (a similar motif alluding to imperial power was used in the palace of Galerius at Gamzigrad). In Domitian propaganda a number of factors seem to support the choice of the archetypal image of the labyrinth and of Theseus as an exemplary hero: the resurgence of analogous Augustean symbols, Alexandrian models, allusions to the Athens acropolis and its patron goddess. It is therefore possible to propose the existence of a parallel between Domitian and Theseus – both favourites of Athena, the goddess of Metis, both presented as civilizing heroes, both seeking the reappropriation and legitimization of power that had initially been denied them.