This sculpture has it's own Wikipedia page (
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""The statue of Laocoön and His Sons (Italian: Gruppo del Laocoonte), also called the Laocoön Group, has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican, where it remains. Exceptionally, it appears to be identifiable with a statue praised in the highest terms by the main Roman writer on art, Pliny the Elder. The figures are near life-size and the group is a little over 2 m (6 ft 7 in) in height, showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents.
The group has been "the prototypical icon of human agony" in Western art, and unlike the agony often depicted in Christian art showing the Passion of Jesus and martyrs, this suffering has no redemptive power or reward. The suffering is shown through the contorted expressions of the faces (Charles Darwin pointed out that Laocoön's bulging eyebrows are physiologically impossible), which are matched by the struggling bodies, especially that of Laocoön himself, with every part of his body straining."
and the Wikipedia page for Laocoön (
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"Laocoön was a Trojan priest of Poseidon (or Neptune), whose rules he defied, either by marrying and having sons, or by committing an impiety by making love with his wife in the presence of a cult image in a sanctuary. He plays a minor role in the Epic Cycle, warning the Trojans in vain against accepting the Trojan Horse from the Greeks—"A deadly fraud is this," he said, "devised by the Achaean chiefs!" He was subsequently subject to divine execution by two serpents sent to Troy across the sea from the island of Tenedos, where the Greeks had temporarily camped.
Laocoön warned his fellow Trojans against the wooden horse presented to the city by the Greeks. In the Aeneid, Virgil gives Laocoön the famous line "Equo ne credite, Teucri / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis", or "Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts." This line is the source of the saying: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.'"