My Latin class has just finished reading Virgil’s depiction of Laocoon’s gruesome end. The poor fellow quite correctly points out that the Trojan Horse is a trick and that the Trojans would be insane (and doomed) to bring it into the city. Alas, the founding of Rome requires that doom, and so the sensible Laocoon needs to be disposed of. The two big carnivorous snakes of my last posting envelop him and his two sons and devour them. Virgil’s account of their deaths is, in my view, one of the highlights of Roman literature. Actually, of all literature. Fast forward to Rome, 1506. A spectacular statue of Laocoon and his sons being attacked by the serpents is discovered in Rome, and it is quite the sensation. Michelangelo, for example, is profoundly influenced by the statue, and you can see its impact in figures he painted in the Sistine Chapel, among other works. The influence of the statue is easy to explain: it is fabulous, it was most likely owned at one point by the Titus, the sacker of Jerusalem and future emperor (celebrity appeal), we (probably) know the artists’ names, and it seems to represent a wonderful and horrifying scene from Virgil. Fast forward to Germany, 1766. The great German Enlightenment writer Lessing compares the natures and virtues of the visual and literary arts in his “Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry.” As the title suggests, the Laocoons – Virgil’s and the statue – provide the test case. A great and influential essay, by the way. Fast forward to Rome, 1996. My wife and I are taking some of our Loyola students around the Vatican, and we are examining the Laocoon statue. Suddenly the alarm goes off, and the guards come a-running. Our three-year-old son had climbed up on the base of the statue and set the alarm off. No one gets arrested, and I actually know someone who (I think) has touched the Laocoon. Fast forward to 2009. My Latin class will be looking at the statue, discussing its complex and remarkable history (as you can imagine, in this posting I have had to greatly oversimplified everything), and reading a section of a Latin poem written by the great Renaissance humanist and secretary to Pope Leo X, Jacopo Sadoleto. Five points, by the way, to anyone who can find the Laocoon connection to R.E.M. and to “A Christmas Carol.” We could have an entire course on Laocoon…mmmm…