The Daily Astorian

The Laocoon.—The Latin poet Virgil has drawn a vivid picture of one of the scenes which hastened the fall of ancient Troy. The noble Trojan priest, Laocoon, denounced the infatuation of his countrymen, when they determined to receive the monstrous wooden horse, stuffed with Greek troops and princes, into the city. He tried every means to rouse his countrymen to a sense of their peril, and at last hurled his spear against the hollow fraud. But lest his passion might be effective, the hostile gods that helped the Greeks sent two snakes over the sea from Tenedos, with crests dropping blood and quivering tongues that licked their hissing mouths. They made their way in the city at once to Laocoon and his sons, wound themselves in frightful festoons round their limbs, bound them in a group of agony which sculpture has made immortal, crushed and choked them, and reared their crests and poisonous tongues over the brow of the patriotic priest, whose chaplet was black with their poison and red with his own death. Thus the Church of Troy was silenced; the serpents nestled safe under the buckler of the goddess in the sanctuary; the wooden horse was admitted, and that night Troy was in flames.

—Starr King.