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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Laocoon Biography LAOCOÖN, lā-ŏk'ō-ŏn (Lat., from Gk. Aαokówv, Laokoōn). According to classic legend, a brother of Anchises (q.v.), priest of Apollo in Troy, who in vain warned his countrymen against receiving within their walls the wooden horse. According to the version given by Vergil in the Æneid (ii, 199 ff.), two serpents then came swimming from Tenedos, attacked the two sons of Laocoön, and, when the father came to their help, destroyed him also. There are many traces of earlier versions: in one only the sons are killed, and the serpents are sent by Apollo as a warning to Æneas; in another destruction falls on the father and one son. The story is not noticed in the Homeric poems, but was told in the later Greek epic and was the subject of a tragedy by Sophocles. It acquires a peculiar interest from being the subject of one of the best-known works of ancient sculpture still in existence—a group discovered in 1506 at Rome, in the Sette Sale, on the side of the Esquiline Hill, and purchased by Pope Julius II for the Vatican. The whole treatment of the subject, the anatomical accuracy of the figures, and the representation both of bodily pain and of passion, have secured for the group a higher place than it properly merits. According to Pliny, a Laocoön was the work of the Rhodian artists Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus. Until lately archæologists differed about the date of the Extant group. Its date, however, has been established by the discovery in Rhodes of a statue of a priest of Athena whose date is 42 B.C. This statue bears the signature of Athenodorus, the son of Agesander, and there is little reason to doubt that this Athenodorus, who later on (22-21 B.C.) appears as priest together with his brother Agesander, was with the latter one of the sculptors of the Extant Laocoön group. Thus the statue antedates Vergil's narrative in the Æneid. In spite of its wonderful execution this group is not an example of the best Greek work, but belongs to a period of low artistic ideals. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 555. |