In Greek and Roman mythology, Laocoön (also Laocoon) was a Trojan priest — of Apollo or Neptune in conflicting accounts — who warned against bringing the Wooden Horse into Troy and was killed with his two sons by giant sea-serpents. Virgil's Aeneid gives him the famous line "I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts." He is not the Calydonian Laocoön son of Porthaon, an Argonaut uncle of Meleager.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Laocoön" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Identity and family
The Trojan Laocoön is variously called son of Acoetes (brother of Anchises), of Antenor, of Poseidon, or even of Priam and Hecuba. He had two sons — named Antiphantes and Thymbraeus in Virgil. He must be kept distinct from Laocoön of Calydon, son of Porthaon, who appears among the Argonauts and has no part in the fall of Troy.
Homer never names him. The story belongs to the Epic Cycle and later epic and tragedy: Sophocles wrote a lost Laocoön; Apollodorus, Hyginus, Quintus of Smyrna, and Virgil preserve the main strands.
II.Warning and death
When the Greeks left the Wooden Horse and withdrew to Tenedos, Laocoön — confirming Cassandra — urged the Trojans to burn or cast it from the cliffs. In Virgil he is a priest of Neptune chosen by lot to sacrifice on the shore; he hurls a spear into the horse's flank and speaks the proverbial distrust of Greek gifts. Two serpents then swim from the sea, crush his sons, and kill or attack him as well.
Who sent the snakes, and why, was disputed. Apollodorus attributes them to Apollo, after Laocoön insulted the god (in one strand by lying with his wife before the cult image). Other versions blame Athena or Poseidon. In some accounts only the sons die and Laocoön lives to suffer; in others the Trojans misread the omen as divine approval of the horse. Euphorion and Servius preserve a version in which he is punished for begetting children on Poseidon's sacred ground — the timing alone making the Trojans take his death as a sign about the horse.
III.Art and reception
The Hellenistic marble group Laocoön and His Sons — attributed by Pliny to Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus of Rhodes — stands in the Vatican Museums and became a touchstone of Western aesthetics, notably in Lessing's Laocoön (1766). Berlioz stages the death in Les Troyens; the figure recurs in Dickens, Steinbeck, modern poetry, and popular culture. This encyclopedic notice concerns only the Trojan priest of the horse episode.