The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [25]
Their burning eyes suffused with blood and fire,
Their darting tongues licking their hissing mouths.
As the crowd watches paralyzed in terror, they make straight for Laocoon and his two young sons, “fastening their fangs in those poor bodies,” coiling around the father’s waist and neck and arms and, as he utters strangled inhuman cries, crush him to death. The appalled watchers are now nearly all moved to believe that the ghastly event is Laocoon’s punishment for sacrilege in striking what must indeed be a sacred offering.
Troublesome even to the ancient poets, the serpents have defied explanation; myth has its mysteries too, not always resolved. Some narrators say they were sent by Poseidon at Athena’s request to prove that his animus against the Trojans was equal to hers. Others say they were sent by Apollo to warn the Trojans of approaching doom (although, since the effect worked the other way, this seems to have a built-in illogic). Virgil’s explanation is that Athena herself was responsible in order to convince the Trojans of Sinon’s story, thus sealing their doom, and in confirmation he has the serpents take refuge in her temple after the event. So difficult was the problem of the serpents that some collaborators of the time suggested that Laocoon’s fate had nothing to do with the Wooden Horse, but was owed to the quite extraneous sin of profaning Apollo’s temple by sleeping with his wife in front of the god’s image.
The blind bard of the Odyssey, who knows nothing of Laocoon, simply states that the argument in favor of welcoming the Horse had to prevail because Troy was ordained to perish—or, as we might interpret it, that mankind in the form of Troy’s citizens is addicted to pursuing policy contrary to self-interest.
The instrumentality of the serpents is not a fact of history to be explained, but a work of imagination, one of the most forceful ever described. It produced, in agonized and twisted marble, so vivid that the victims’ cries seem almost to be heard, a major masterpiece of classical sculpture. Seeing it in the palace of the Emperor Titus in Rome, Pliny the Elder thought it a work to be preferred “above all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced.” Yet the statue is dumb as to cause and significance. Sophocles wrote a tragedy on the theme of Laocoon but the text disappeared and his thoughts are lost. The existence of the legend can tell us only one thing: that Laocoon was fatally punished for perceiving the truth and warning of it.
While on Priam’s orders ropes and rollers are prepared to pull the Horse into the city, unnamed forces still try to warn Troy. Four times at the Gate’s threshold, the Horse comes to a halt and four times from the interior the clang of arms sounds, yet though the halts are an omen, the Trojans press on, “heedless and blind with frenzy.” They breach the walls and the Gate, unconcerned at thus tearing the sacred veil because they believe its protection is no longer needed. In post-Aeneid versions, other portents follow: smoke rises stained with blood, tears flow from the statues of the gods, towers groan as if in pain, mist covers the stars, wolves and jackals howl, laurel withers in the temple of Apollo, but the Trojans take no alarm. Fate drives fear from their minds “so that they might meet their doom and be destroyed.”
That night they celebrate, feasting and drinking with carefree hearts. A last chance and a last warning are offered. Cassandra, Priam’s daughter, possesses the gift of prophecy conferred on her by Apollo, who, on falling in love with her, gave it in exchange for her promise to lie with him. When Cassandra, dedicating herself to virginity, went back on her promise, the offended god added to his gift a curse providing that her prophecies would never be believed. Ten years before, when Paris first sailed for Sparta, Cassandra had indeed foretold that his voyage would bring doom upon his house, but Priam had paid no attention.