Laocoön and His Sons

Abstract

In her paper, Kubale discusses the myth of Laocoön and which version of it was used as model for the famous statue group `Laocoön and His Sons' now in the Vatican Museums in Rome. There are fundamentally two possibilities: the version of Bacchylides and the more popular one of Vergil’s Aeneid. After this, Kubale examines whether the various arguments and methodological approaches of research concerning this matter. How do they differ, what kind of basis or strategy do the researchers use and which intention do they have? Apart from that, we will ascertain whether it is possible to find a plausible solution or if it is simply not important on which version the statue was modelled after all.