1. Laocoön and His Sons Athanadoros, Hagesandros, and Polydoros of Rhodes early 1st century., Vatican Museum

2. El Greco. Laocoon. 1608-1614. Oil on canvas
El Greco. Laocoon Oil on canvas.142 x 193 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington

3. F. Kontoglou, "Laocoon", 1938, oils, 80x100 cm.

4. Edge of the Ciy: Laocoön, c. 1989-90
Anne Tabachnick
Edge of the Ciy: Laocoön, c
Acrylic on canvas, 30 1/8 x 36 1/2 inches

6. Peter Petri (contemporary). Laocoon in Legoland.

7. Black-figure vase. British Museum

8. Detail from red-figure vase

10. Aeneas carries his father Anchises and leads his son Ascanius from burning Troy: copy of a wall painting from Pompeii, first century AD. (VRoma: EUR (Rome), Museum of Roman Civilization: Barbara McManus)

12. RAFFAELLO Sanzio. (b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma)
The Fire in the Borgo resco, width at base: 670 cm Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican

13. RAFFAELLO Sanzio. (b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma)
The Fire in the Borgo resco, width at base: 670 cm Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican

14. Aeneas flees burning Troy, Federico Barocci, 1598.

15. Bernini, Gianlorenzo Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius Marble height 86 5/8" (2.2 m) Galleria Borghese, Rome

16. LOO, Carle van
French painter (b. 1705, Nice, d. 1765, Paris)
Aeneas Carrying Anchises 1729 Oil on canvas, 110 x 105 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris

17. Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius
BERNINI, Gian Lorenzo
(b. 1598, Napoli, d. 1680, Roma)
Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius
Marble, height: 220 cm Galleria Borghese, Rome
Perhaps the most important attraction of Latin is the literature it has produced. Those who read the love poetry of Catullus or the powerful speeches of Cicero or the inspiring epic verse of Virgil in the original Latin often become hooked on the language.
The value of this experience is voiced in the modern world by none other than Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach. In his autobiography, called By the Book, Paterno describes how, in his senior year of high school, he was led to Vergil by a Jesuit priest named Father Bermingham. When Father Bermingham suggested that Joe read the Aeneid with him, Joe replied "Sure." "But," said the priest, "what I had in mind was reading it together in the original Latin." "In Latin? A poem as long as a book?" "Yes." Joe remembers the book was on Father Bermingham's desk, more than four hundred pages thick and comments that, as a schoolkid, he always had the attitude about any challenge, "Hey, if it's difficult, let's do it." That made it more fun. He then asked uncertainly, "But if it's in Latin, will we be able to cover all that?"
To this, wise Father Bermingham replied with a lesson many teachers today would do well to remember. He said: "What's important is not how much we cover It's not how much we do, but the excellence of what we do." "Excellence," Paterno recollects, "the way he pronounced that word made it shine with a golden light."
Father Bermingham's sense of excellence is perhaps no clearer than in the character of Aeneas himself, who is frequently called pius or pious by Vergil. Now to us the word piety suggests devotion to religious duties and practices. For us someone is pious who attends church every Sunday, reads the Bible, and prays regularly. Perhaps even some of us can remember a time when piety was also applied to loyalty and devotion to parents and family and when a pious person was someone who showed respect for and dedication to his parents.
For Aeneas and for the Romans, however, pietas was more than that. Certainly it included devotion to one's parents and to one's gods, but it also meant devotion to one's country, that is, what we call patriotism. Family and country are, in fact, tightly bound in Latin, where the word for father is pater and the word for country is patria, that is "fatherland." So a patriot is someone who treats his country as devotedly as he treats his own father.
Aeneas is such a patriot. Aeneas epitomizes the Roman concept of pietas when he carries his old father Anchises on his back as he escapes from burning Troy. This, in itself, is an act of devotion to one's natural father, but Anchises holds in his hands the family's household gods, the lares and the penates. So Aeneas' act is also an act of devotion to the gods. And it is these household gods which will become the national gods of the Roman state. So in this act, Aeneas is simultaneously pious on all three levels important to the Romans: family, gods and country. Thus reading the Aeneid in English is not enough. In order to understand what Vergil really means by pietas and why his hero acts the way he does, we really need to read it in Latin.
It is only from this perspective that we can later understand why Aeneas can cruelly leave Dido, the queen of Carthage, and sail for Italy. Aeneas did not wish to leave Dido, whom he loved passionately. In fact, he would not have left her if it were not for a miracle, if the god Mercury had not flown down from Mount Olympus to tell Aeneas that Jupiter wanted him to go. Thus, Aeneas HAD to leave Dido. After all, you can't "just say no" to a god. Aeneas' pious devotion to his father, his country and his gods demanded that Aeneas abandon Dido in order to found a new country in Italy. It may seem difficult for us to understand in our "me" society, but Aeneas placed duty over self. He did not do what he wanted to do. He did what any pious Roman would or should have done.
Vergil thus confronts us with a different way of thinking and of looking at the world.