Laocoon Author:Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: V. There are connoisseurs of antiquity who hold indeed that the Laocoon group was the work of a Greek master, but of the time of the emperors, because they be... more »lieve that the Virgilian Laocoon served as the model for it. Of all the ancient learned men who have been of this opinion I will only mention Bartholomew Marliani"; and of the modern, Montfauconb. They found, without doubt, so remarkable an agreement between the work of art and the description of the poet that it appeared to them impossible that both should by accident have lighted upon the same circumstances, which certainly do not naturally suggest themselves. They further maintain that as to the honour attaching to the invention and first conception, the probability is much more in favour of the poet than the artist. Only they appear to have forgotten that a third predicament is possible. For, perhaps, the poet has as little imitated the artist as the artist has the poet, but both have drawn their supply from the same ancient fountains. According to Macrobius0, the works of Pisan- der were these ancient sources. For while the works of this Greek poet were yet extant, it was a matter of school learning, pueris dccantatum, that the Roman writer had not so much imitated as literally translatedthe whole conquest and destruction of Ilium, that is, his whole second book. If, moreover, Pisander had been Virgil's predecessor in the history of Laocoon, it was nevertheless not the custom of the Greek artists to derive their instruction from any Latin poet, and the conjecture drawn from the epoch rests on no foundation. In the meanwhile, if I were compelled to maintain the opinion of Marliani and Montfaucon, I would offer them the following escape from the objection. The poems of Pisander are lost: how he told the story of Laoc...« less