1506 in the presence of the great Italian Renaissance artist Michelan-
gelo. The marble group, long believed an original of the second cen-
turyBCE, was found in the remains of the palace of the emperor Titus
(r. 79–81CE), exactly where Pliny had seen it more than 14 centuries
before. Pliny attributed the statue to three sculptors—Athanadoros,
Hagesandros,and Polydoros of Rhodes—whom most art histori-
ans now think worked in the early first centuryCE. They probably
based their group on a Hellenistic masterpiece depicting Laocoön and
only one son. Their variation on the original added the son at Lao-
coön’s left (note the greater compositional integration of the two other
figures) to conform with the Roman poet Vergil’s account in the
Aeneid.Vergil vividly described the strangling of Laocoön and his two
sons by sea serpents while sacrificing at an altar. The gods who favored
the Greeks in the war against Troy had sent the serpents to punish Lao-
coön, who had tried to warn his compatriots about the danger of
bringing the Greeks’ wooden horse within the walls of their city.
In Vergil’s graphic account, Laocoön suffered in terrible agony,
and the sculptors communicated the torment of the priest and his sons
in a spectacular fashion in the marble group. The three Trojans writhe
in pain as they struggle to free themselves from the death grip of the
serpents. One bites into Laocoön’s left hip as the priest lets out a fero-
cious cry. The serpent-entwined figures recall the suffering giants of the
great frieze of the Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, and Laocoön himself is
strikingly similar to Alkyoneos (FIG. 5-79), Athena’s opponent. In fact,
many scholars believe that a Pergamene statuary group of the second
centuryBCEwas the inspiration for the three Rhodian sculptors.
SPERLONGAThat the work seen by Pliny and displayed in the
Vatican Museums today was made for Romans rather than Greeks
was confirmed in 1957 by the discovery of fragments of several Hel-
lenistic-style groups illustrating scenes from Homer’s Odyssey.These
fragments were found in a grotto that served as the picturesque sum-
mer banquet hall of the seaside villa of the Roman emperor Tiberius
(r. 14–37CE) at Sperlonga, some 60 miles south of Rome. One of these
groups—depicting the monster Scylla attacking Odysseus’s ship—is
signed by the same three sculptors Pliny cited as the creators of the
Laocoön group. Another of the groups, installed around a central
pool in the grotto, depicted the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemos
by Odysseus and his comrades, an incident also set in a cave in the
Homeric epic. The head of Odysseus (FIG. 5-89) from this theatrical
group is one of the finest sculptures of antiquity. The hero’s cap can
barely contain his swirling locks of hair. Even Odysseus’s beard seems
to be swept up in the emotional intensity of the moment. The parted
lips and the deep shadows produced by sharp undercutting add
drama to the head, which complemented Odysseus’s agitated body.
At Tiberius’s villa in Sperlonga and in Titus’s palace in Rome,
the baroque school of Hellenistic sculpture lived on long after
Greece ceased to be a political force. When Rome inherited the
Pergamene kingdom from the last of the Attalids in 133BCE, it also
became heir to the Greek artistic legacy, and what Rome adopted
from Greece it in turn passed on to the medieval and modern
worlds. If Greece was peculiarly the inventor of the European spirit,
Rome surely was its propagator and amplifier.154 Chapter 5 ANCIENT GREECE
5-89Athanadoros, Hagesandros,and Polydoros of Rhodes,
head of Odysseus, from Sperlonga, Italy, early first century ce.Marble,
2 1 – 41 high. Museo Archeologico, Sperlonga.
This emotionally charged depiction of Odysseus was part of a mytho-
logical statuary group that the Laocoön sculptors made for a grotto at
the emperor Tiberius’s seaside villa at Sperlonga.1 in.