Are we the Laocoons of today?

BN Goswamy

Art Historian

And rolling bloodshot eyes of fire,/Dart their forked tongues, and hiss for ire./(The serpents) fly distraught; unswerving they/Toward Laocoon hold their way;/First round his two young sons they wreathe,/And grind their limbs with savage teeth:/Then, as with arms, he comes to aid,/The wretched father they invade/And twine in giant folds; twice round/His stalwart waist their spires are wound,/Twice round his neck while over all/Their heads and crests tower high and tall./He strains his strength their knots to tear,/While gore and slime his fillets smear,/And to the unregardful skies/Sends up his agonising cries.

(Virgil, The Aeneid, Book II; Translated by John Conington)

Is there not the need to put up a struggle with ‘daunting courage’, and end up on top, rewriting what happens in the legend?

As grim portents swirl around while the Covid virus rages, I am sure images of different kinds, and intensity, rise to the surface in minds everywhere. Different minds; different images: rabbits caught in the glare of oncoming cars, for instance; harried hordes of men and women of ancient Egypt, scrambling to escape the wrath of an angry god, as told in the Bible; birds and animals screaming and perishing in bushfires; bodies wasted by the great plague — the Black Death of medieval times — lying piled up on street corner after street corner. Fortunately, we are nowhere near that. But an image that keeps coming persistently to my mind is that of Laocoon: the Trojan priest caught in the coils of deadly serpents, along with his two sons. Why, I do not quite know, but, just possibly, because, as told in Greek and Roman versions, or in one of the greatest sculptures of the western world — Laocoon and his Sons — the story is complex, even ambiguous, leaving wide spaces open to interpretation. Also, possibly because one wonders if there are things that we in our own frayed times can learn from it.

To remind ourselves first, however, of the ancient legend which goes back to the times that Homer speaks of: times of the great, 10-year-long conflict between the Trojans and the Greeks. There are variations in the telling of the legend, but, broadly, when the Greeks played a great ruse, and, while ostensibly lifting the siege of Troy, left a massive wooden horse in which Greek soldiers were hidden, as a ‘gift’ for the Trojans, the Trojan priest, Laocoon, suspected the ‘gift’ and warned his countrymen against bringing the wooden horse into the city. To emphasise that something might be hidden inside the giant horse, he threw his lance at it first. This angered the goddess Athena — and the god Apollo whose shrine the priest had desecrated by making love to his wife in front of it — and she, favouring the Greeks, ordered two sea-serpents which, ‘rolling bloodshot eyes of fire’, and ‘hissing with ire’, attacked Laocoon and his two sons, biting and crushing them in their coils. These ‘agonised cries’ of Laocoon sent up to ‘unregardful skies’ are what were captured in the great marble sculpture which dated back to the 1st century, but had been lost only to be unearthed from some ruins close to Rome in the 16th century. The sculpture might have disappeared from sight for all these centuries, but the tragedy of Laocoon has always lived in the memory of Europe. Sophocles, the great playwright, wrote on it, one knows, even though his work has been lost. In Virgil’s great epic, the Aeneid, Laocoon comes in for detailed and passionate mention. Over time, several other authors wrote works with the figure of Laocoon at their centre. One of the most celebrated treatises on aesthetics ever written, in which Lessing discussed the ‘Limits of Painting and Poetry’, was titled ‘Laocoon’. Along with the fate of Laocoon as a theme has survived the fame of the Laocoon sculpture which continues to have a powerful hold over the European imagination. Writing long ago, Pliny the Elder had spoken of it as ‘a work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have ever produced’. When Michelangelo saw it soon after it surfaced, he was deeply moved by it and commended to the Pope the idea of adding it to the collection in the Vatican. Napoleon saw it as a great prize of war after his Italian victories and had it taken to France.

Both as a sculpture and as a legend, however, Laocoon has remained a theme for discussion. When Winckelmann saw the expression on the face of Laocoon in the sculpture as ‘a supreme symbol of the moral dignity of the tragic hero’ and ‘the most complete exemplification of the noble simplicity and calm grandeur’ that one associates with Greek art, Lessing differed vehemently and saw there great suffering and agony. Aesthetic discussions like these apart, what is of great interest also are the philosophical questions that have been raised from time to time over the fate of Laocoon. Was he being punished for doing wrong, or for being right, it has been asked. Was the alleged desecration of Apollo’s shrine enough of a justification for the god to consign his own priest to this tormented state? Is there not some ‘divine duplicity’ at work here, someone has remarked, and can one place faith in the good intention of celestial powers?

Coming back to our own times. Are we a bit like Laocoon: caught in the coils of the virus and being ‘punished’ for transgressions? Against Nature? Against man? Can one place faith in the supposed ‘good intention’ of others: like China, for instance? Is there not the need to put up a struggle with ‘daunting courage’, like Laocoon does, and end up on top, rewriting what happens in the legend? There are things to ponder here.

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