Laocoön
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Laocoön, the son of Acoetes is a figure in Greek mythology, a Trojan priest of Poseidon, (or Neptune), whose rules he had defied, either by marrying and having sons, or by having committed an impiety by making love with his wife in the presence of a cult image in a sanctuary. 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!" — and for his subsequent divine execution by two serpents sent to Troy across the sea from the island of Tenedos, where the Greeks had temporarily camped.
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 death of Laocoön was famously depicted in a much-admired marble Lacoön 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 Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 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 ("Laocoön and her two sons," rendering him female in the song). The marble's pose is parodied in Asterix and the Laurel Wreath.
