Laocoön

Laocoön was a priest at Troy in the last days of the siege, and the sources do not agree on whose. Virgil makes him a priest of Neptune, chosen by lot. Hyginus calls him a priest of Apollo, the son of Acoetes and brother of Anchises, which would make him the uncle of Aeneas. The commentator Servius, citing the poet Euphorion, says he was a priest of Thymbraean Apollo picked by lot when the Trojans needed someone to sacrifice to Neptune, and gives his wife's name as Antiopa.

The best-known scene is in Book 2 of Virgil's Aeneid. The Greeks have sailed away, leaving the wooden horse on the beach. Laocoön runs down from the citadel with a crowd behind him and asks whether the Trojans think the Greeks have really gone. He asks whether any Greek gift is free of trickery, and whether anyone knows Odysseus as an honest man. He guesses that armed men are hidden in the wood, or that it is a siege engine. His verdict is the famous line "quicquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis": whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts. Then he throws a heavy spear into the horse's flank. It quivers, and the hollow belly rings. Virgil adds that if the fates and the Trojans' minds had not been against them, that spear would have torn open the Greek hiding place and Troy would still stand.

Apollodorus has no spear. In his Epitome the Trojans find the Greek camp deserted and drag the wooden horse next to Priam's palace. Cassandra says armed men are inside, and Laocoön the seer backs her. Some Trojans want to burn the horse, others to throw it off a cliff, but most want to keep it as an offering to a god. In this version Laocoön is a seer who gives correct advice, and he is ignored.

In Virgil the warning is answered by a portent, just after the Trojans believe the lies of Sinon. Laocoön is sacrificing a great bull at the altars when two serpents cross the calm sea from Tenedos, their crests standing above the waves. The crowd scatters. The serpents make for Laocoön and go first for his two young sons and feed on their limbs. When Laocoön comes to help, armed, they seize him too, and wind twice around his middle and twice around his neck. His priestly headbands are soaked with venom and blood. He tries to tear the coils apart and roars like a wounded bull that has shaken the axe from its neck and escaped the altar.

The serpents then glide up to the shrine on the citadel and hide under the feet of the goddess and the round of her shield. Virgil calls her Tritonis, meaning Athena (Minerva). The frightened Trojans draw a conclusion: Laocoön has paid for a crime, because he struck the sacred oak with his spear. They demand that the image be honored and the horse brought in. They breach their own wall, fit rollers under the horse and haul it up on ropes to the song of boys and girls. Four times it stalls at the threshold, and four times the armor inside clashes. Cassandra opens her mouth once more with a true warning and is not believed, and the Trojans hang the temples with festal garlands.

The sources disagree most about why he died. Apollodorus says only that Apollo sent a sign: two serpents swam from the neighboring islands and devoured the sons of Laocoön. His account does not say the priest himself died or that anyone had offended a god. Hyginus makes Laocoön a priest of Apollo who had married and had children against the god's will. The lot chose him to sacrifice to Neptune on the shore, and Apollo used the chance to send two snakes from Tenedos against his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus. They killed Laocoön too when he tried to help. Hyginus adds that the Phrygians thought the cause was his spear thrown at the horse.

Servius offers the fullest form of the Apollo version. He says Laocoön committed a sacrilege before the image of the god by lying with his wife, and was killed with his sons by serpents sent for that reason. This, Servius says, is what the story contains, but Virgil turned it into an excuse for the Trojans, who did not know about the earlier offense. Virgil's own Trojans blame the spear. Servius also passes on another view: after Laomedon cheated Neptune, Troy had no fixed priest of that god, which would explain why a priest had to be chosen by lot.

Quintus Smyrnaeus, a later Greek epic poet, gives a third cause in Book 12 of the Posthomerica. Laocoön urges the Trojans to burn the horse and Athena, angry with him, shakes the ground under his feet. She blinds him with a burning pain in his eyes. She then sends two serpents from a cave on the island of Calydna against his sons. His sons are seized and killed while he stands helplessly by. The serpents vanish into the earth near the shrine of Apollo in Pergamus, and the Trojans raise an empty tomb for the boys. In Quintus, Laocoön survives, blind.

J. G. Frazer, in the notes to his edition of Apollodorus, sets these out as three body counts. According to Arctinus, the oldest authority, the serpents killed Laocoön and one son. Virgil, Hyginus and Servius have both sons and their father die. Quintus has only the sons perish. Frazer also says Sophocles wrote a play on the subject, of which a few fragments survive, and its contents are unknown.

Laocoön's line gave English the proverb about Greeks bearing gifts, from Virgil's "timeo Danaos et dona ferentis". His death also gave the ancient world one of its most admired statues. Pliny the Elder, in Book 36 of his Natural History, says the Laocoön in the palace of the emperor Titus was better than any painting or bronze. He says Laocoön, his children and the snakes' coils were carved from a single block by three sculptors of Rhodes, Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus. A marble group found in Rome in 1506 is widely thought to be the one Pliny saw, and is now in the Vatican Museums. Scholars still debate whether the Rhodians made an original or copied an earlier bronze.