Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A Trojan priest of Apollo who was killed along with his two sons by two sea serpents for having warned his people of the Trojan horse.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Class. Myth.) A priest of Apollo, during the Trojan war. (See 2.)
- noun (Sculp.) A marble group in the Vatican at Rome, representing the priest Laocoön, with his sons, infolded in the coils of two serpents, as described by Virgil.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (Greek mythology) the priest of Apollo who warned the Trojans to beware of Greeks bearing gifts when they wanted to accept the Trojan Horse; a god who favored the Greeks (Poseidon or Athena) sent snakes who coiled around Laocoon and his two twin sons killing them
Etymologies
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Examples
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Among standard critical works the one that has most impressed me is Lessing's "Laocoon" -- at any rate the literary parts of it.
Books and Persons Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 Arnold Bennett 1899
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'Laocoon' -- my friend Gibson's 'Nymth,' you see, is the only figure I admit among the antiques.
The Newcomes William Makepeace Thackeray 1837
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Was there ever a man called Laocoon, who strangled sea serpents?
General John Regan George A. Birmingham 1907
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Pliny also tells us that the Laocoon was the work of three sculptors, AGESANDER, POLYDORUS, and ATHENODORUS.
A History of Art for Beginners and Students Painting, Sculpture, Architecture Clara Erskine Clement Waters 1875
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Colossus was one of the wonders of the world, seventy cubits in height, and the Laocoon is a perfect miracle of art, in which group pathos is exhibited in the highest degree ever attained in sculpture.
The Old Roman World, : the Grandeur and Failure of Its Civilization. John Lord 1852
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Leave action and movement to the temporal art of poetry, Lessing argued in his 1766 essay "Laocoon" (translated into French in 1802 and known by every serious artist ever after).
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It might be possible, for instance, to show children the difference between the real ugliness in the priest's face of the "Laocoon" group, because of the motive of courage and endurance behind the suffering.
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Then comes the question of theories of criticism -- can he do with less than, say, an acquaintance with Aristotle, and Lessing's "Laocoon," or even with so little?
Our Stage and Its Critics By "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette" Edward Fordham Spence 1896
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It might be possible, for instance, to show children the difference between the real ugliness in the priest's face of the "Laocoon" group, because of the motive of courage and endurance behind the suffering.
The Art of the Story-Teller Marie L. Shedlock 1894
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[Illustration: Schematic of Temple Arch] so, of which the mother was the centre figure; this makes it more probable, but the difficulty to this hypothesis is, that there do not appear to be the necessary gradations in the size or altitude of the other figures; the sons in the 'Laocoon' are certainly little men.
The Greville Memoirs A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Volume 1 (of 3) Charles Greville 1829
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