Laocoon
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Laocoon. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
la-ok'o-on, in Greek mythology, a brother of Anchises, a priest of Apollo. He married against the will of the god Apollo. He and his two sons were attacked by serpents and strangled while attempting to sacrifice a bull at the altar of Poseidon. Virgil uses the legend in his Aeneid. He represents that the priest and his sons were strangled at the altar because they had warned the Trojans against admitting the wooden horse within their walls. In 1506 a marble group was found under rubbish near the baths of Titus in Rome. It was recognized at once as a long lost group of Laocoon to which frequent mention had been made in literature. It is now preserved in the Vatican. It represents father and sons struggling in the folds of the serpents. It is composed of several pieces of marble joined together so skillfully as to seem one. It is considered the production of three sculptors who worked at Rhodes. The right arm of Laocoon was lacking. A dispute arose over its restoration. The "Laocoon Controversy," as it is known in literature, was the subject of several scores of doctors' theses, that is to say, graduation essays, of the universities in Germany. Lessing devoted a volume to the Laocoon myth and group. It has now been decided that the arm of the father should be bent so that the hand is near the head. See Sculpture
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
according to legend, a priest of Apollo, afteraccording of Poseidon, in Troy, who married Apollo, a the will of the former god, and who ma warned his countrymen against admer god the wooden horse into Troy. For n agains both of these reasons he was deato Troy. along with his two sons by two ns he wa serpents which came up out of sons b . The subject is represented in ame un the most famous works of ancient represen still in existence, a group discks of s in 1506 at Rome, and purchased a gro Julius II. for the Vatican. It and pu carried by Bonaparte to Paris in Vatic but recovered in 1814. According to P , it was the work of the Rhodian 4. Ac , Agesander, Polydorus, and Athethe . The best authorities place its us, ar a little before 100 b. c. ities C.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A priest of Apollo who in the Trojan war was opposed to the admission of the wooden horse to the city. For this, as a punishment, two enormous serpents were sent to attack him, which they did while, accompanied by his two sons, he was offering a sacrifice to Neptune. The serpents coiled round him and his sons, and crushed them to death. Lord Byron, in Childe Harold, canto iv., thus alludes to the Laocoon group in marble in the Vatican : "Or, turning to the Vatican, go see Laocoon's torture, dignifying pain- A father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending. Vain The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench; the long, envenom'd chain Rivets the living links-the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp."
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The myth itself reads as it always did, but the statue has physically changed since these accounts. Aiton's in 1910 reported that the "Laocoon Controversy" over the missing right arm had been settled in favour of a bent arm near the head he Ro, the German archaeologist Ludwig Pollak had found a bent marble arm in a Roman stonemason's yard, and in a restoration completed around 1960 the Vatican removed the old outstretched plaster arm and fitted Pollak's, so visitors now see the group essentially as Aiton's predicted. Dating has also loosened: where Collier's in 1921 followed Pliny and put the work "a little before 100 b.c.", the sculptures found in 1957 in the grotto at Sperlonga, signed by the same three Rhodian names, led many scholars to place these artists in the early Roman imperial period, and to argue the Laocoon may be a first-century version of an earlier Hellenistic composition.
Written for this edition, 2026.