Laocoön ( /leɪˈɒkɵ.ɒn/; Ancient Greek: Λαοκόων, IPA: [laokóɔːn]) the son of Acoetes[1] is a figure in Greek and Roman mythology.
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Laocoön is a Trojan priest of Poseidon[2] (or Neptune), whose rules he had defied, either by marrying and having sons,[3] or by having committed an impiety by making love with his wife in the presence of a cult image in a sanctuary.[4] His minor role in the Epic Cycle narrating the Trojan War was of warning the Trojans in vain against accepting the Trojan Horse from the Greeks—"A deadly fraud is this," he said, "devised by the Achaean chiefs!"[5]—and his subsequent divine execution by two serpents sent to Troy across the sea from the island of Tenedos, where the Greeks had temporarily camped.[6]
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 most detailed description of Laocoön's grisly fate was provided by Quintus Smyrnaeus in Posthomerica, a later, literary version of events following the Iliad. According to Quintus, Laocoön begged the Trojans to set fire to the horse to ensure it was not a trick. Athena, angry with him and the Trojans, shook the ground around Laocoön's feet and painfully blinded him. The Trojans, watching this unfold, assumed Laocoön was punished for The Trojans' mutilating and doubting Sinon, the undercover Greek soldier sent to convince the Trojans to let him and the horse inside their city walls. Thus, the Trojans wheeled the great wooden Horse in. Laocoön did not give up trying to convince the Trojans to burn the horse, and Athena makes him pay even further. She sends two giant sea serpents to strangle and kill him and his two sons.[7] In another version of the story, it was said that Poseidon sent the sea serpents to to strangle and kill Laocoön and his two sons.
According to Apollodorus, it was Apollo who sent the two sea serpents. Laocoön had insulted Apollo by sleeping with his wife in front of the "divine image".[8]
Virgil employed the motif in the Aeneid. The Trojans, according to Virgil, disregarded Laocoön's advice and were taken in by the deceitful testimony of Sinon; in his resulting anger, Laocoön threw his spear at the Horse. Minerva, who was supporting the Greeks, at this moment sent sea-serpents to strangle Laocoön and his two sons, Antiphantes and Thymbraeus. "Laocoön, ostensibly sacrificing a bull to Neptune on behalf of the city (lines 201ff.), becomes himself the tragic victim, as the simile (lines 223–24) makes clear. In some sense, his death must be symbolic of the city as a whole," S. V. Tracy notes.[9] According to the Hellenistic poet Euphorion of Chalcis,[10] Laocoön is in fact punished for procreating upon holy ground sacred to Poseidon; only unlucky timing caused the Trojans to misinterpret his death as punishment for striking the Horse, which they bring into the city with disastrous consequences. The episode furnished the subject of Sophocles' lost tragedy, Laocoön.
In Aeneid Virgil describes the circumstances of Laocoön's death:
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The death of Laocoön was famously depicted in a much-admired marble Laocoön and his Sons, attributed by Pliny the Elder to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, which stands in the Vatican Museums, Rome. Copies have been executed by various artists, notably Baccio Bandinelli. These show the complete sculpture (with conjectural reconstructions of the missing pieces) and can be seen in Rhodes, at the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, Rome, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and in front of the Archaeological Museum, Odessa, Ukraine, amongst others.
The marble Laocoön provided the central image for Lessing's Laocoön, 1766, an aesthetic polemic directed against Winckelmann and the comte de Caylus. Daniel Albright reengages the role of the figure of Laocoön in aesthetic thought in his book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Literature, Music, and Other Arts. [cite El Greco painting]
In addition to other literary references, John Barth employs a bust of Laocoön in his novella, The End of the Road. The R.E.M. song "Laughing" references Laocoön, rendering him female ("Laocoön and her two sons"). The marble's pose is parodied in the comic book Asterix and the Laurel Wreath. American author Joyce Carol Oates also references Laocoön in her 1989 novel "American Appetites." In Stave V of "A Christmas Carol", by Charles Dickens (1843), Scrooge awakes on Christmas morning "...making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings." Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly begins with an extensive analysis of the Laocoön story.
Arctinus, OCT Homer 5.107.23; pseudo-Apollodorus, Epitome 5.18; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.48.2; Petronius 89; Servius on Aeneid 2.201; Hyginus, Fabula 135; Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthomerica 12.445ff; John Tzetzes, Ad Lycophron 347.[12]