Laocoön

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Statue of Laocoön in the Vatican

Laocoön (in Greek – Λαοκόων, pronounced roughly La — oh — koh — on), son of Priam, was allegedly a priest of Poseidon (or of Apollo, by some accounts) at Troy; he was famous for warning the Trojans in vain against accepting the Trojan Horse from the Greeks, and for his subsequent divine execution.

Virgil's Aeneid describes the circumstances of Laocoön's death as follows:

Laocoön warned his fellow Trojans against the wooden horse presented to the city by the Greeks. In the Aeneid, Virgil gives Laocoön the famous line Equo ne credite, Teucri / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, or "Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts." This line is the source of the saying: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

The Trojans disregarded his advice, however, and in his resulting anger Laocoön threw his spear at the Horse. Poseidon (some say Athena), who was supporting the Greeks, subsequently sent sea-serpents to strangle Laocoön and his two sons, Antiphantes and Thymbraeus. Another tradition states that Apollo sent the serpents for an unrelated offense, and only unlucky timing caused the Trojans to misinterpret them as punishment for striking the Horse. It was the subject of Sophocles' lost tragedy, Laocoon. According to the hellenistic poet Euphorion of Chalcis, Apollo was punishing Laocoon for procreating upon holy ground sacred to Poseidon.

Virgil describes this scene by the lines (original Latin):

Ille simul manibus tendit divellere nodos

perfusus sanie vittas atroque veneno,
clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit:
qualis mugitus, fugit cum saucius aram
taurus et incertam excussit cervice securim.

Literal English translation:

At the same time as, with his hands, he strives to tear away the knots,

his headband soaked with blood and black poison,
he also raises horrifying shrieks to the stars:
like a bellowing [bull], when it flees, wounded, from the altar,
bull, and it shakes an uncertain axe from its neck.

John Dryden's poetic English translation (see [1], line 290):

With both his hands he labors at the knots;

His holy fillets the blue venom blots;
His roaring fills the flitting air around.
Thus, when an ox receives a glancing wound,
He breaks his bands, the fatal altar flies,
And with loud bellowings breaks the yielding skies.

The death of Laocoön was famously depicted in a great marble sculpture, entitled Lacoön and His Sons (attributed to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus), which stands in the Vatican Museums in Rome.

Daniel Albright engages the role of the figure of Laocoön in aesthetic thought in his book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Literature, Music, and Other Arts.