Las Vegas is a temple of the ersatz celebrating the vacuousness of gambled fortunes. For all the glitz and neon grandeur (quickly being replaced by LEDs), Las Vegas is usually an honest thief. Everyone knows that isn’t the Eiffel Tower, nor the Montgolfier balloon in front of Paris; New York, New York’s scale is wrong and isn’t as grand as the city itself; and the Luxor isn’t a monument for Pharaoh.
For Spring Break 2023 we stayed on the 58th floor of the Cosmopolitan with a commanding view of the strip. This visit we rented an Audi RS Q8 and took it to Red Rock Canyon. It was a cloudy and drizzling daytrip – reminding us all of home – and of the Painted Hills.
The car was the highlight of the trip for Adin. The RS Q8 shares the same engine as the Urus and is very quick off the line with a 3.6 second 0-60 while seating five people.
It was a fun ride and it has a g-force display on the dash so you can prove how well it corners.
For Kyrian we did the chef’s nine-course meal at Superfrico – with fresh mozzarella made table-side.
Most of the trip we – as is typical for my family – walked the strip just taking in the sights and looking at the luxury shops at the Venetian and Caesar’s Palace.
This trip, I noticed a fountain nearly hidden by an escalator in the Forum Shops labeled Neptune’s Fountain.
While I fully appreciate the curated shams of Vegas, a blatant error I cannot accept. This isn’t Neptune – rather, it depicts the death of Laocoön and His Sons.[1]
In Virgil’s Aeneid, Laocoön is the Trojan priest who saw through the Greek ruse of the horse and warned, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”
Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī / Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs
Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.
The Trojans ignored him. Despite the stratagem working, Athena sent serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons for his interference. Athena, ever-protecting her Odysseus.
The statue freezes the moment when:
Unswerving then
Aeneid, Bk 2
the monsters to Laocoon made way.
First round the tender limbs of his two sons
each dragon coiled, and on the shrinking flesh
fixed fast and fed. Then seized they on the sire,
who flew to aid, a javelin in his hand,
embracing close in bondage serpentine
twice round the waist; and twice in scaly grasp
around his neck, and o’er him grimly peered
with lifted head and crest; he, all the while,
his holy fillet fouled with venomous blood,
tore at his fetters with a desperate hand,
and lifted up such agonizing voice,
as when a bull, death-wounded, seeks to flee
the sacrificial altar, and thrusts back
from his doomed head the ill-aimed, glancing blade.
There are, of course, earlier versions than Vigil’s. A lost play by Sophocles makes Laocoön a priest of Apollo who is punished for violating a vow of celibacy (the Bibliotheca by Apollodorus follows this skein). Sophocles’ version is crueler than Virgil’s. In that version only his sons are slain, leaving Laocoön alone to suffer. (Quintus of Smyrna follows Virgil in making Athena his tormentor.)
Prophecy is dangerous for both the supplicant and prophet alike. The people of Troy take Laocoön’s death as punishment for striking the horse with a spear, proving that the horse was in fact a sacred idol:
Of his vast guilt
Laocoon,” they say, “receives reward;
for he with most abominable spear
did strike and violate that blessed wood.
Yon statue to the temple! Ask the grace
of glorious Pallas!” So the people cried
in general acclaim.
Poor Laocoön – damned if you do, damned if you don’t. He is the male Cassandra. Both are punished grievously by the gods for being right even while being ignored by humans.
Laocoön’s suffering was a precursor to what every Trojan would suffer as a result of their not heeding his warning. And Laocoön’s suffering was impossibly great.
Charles Darwin notes the impossibly furrowed brows that stretch unbroken in the marble from side to side. Darwin’s (1872) study of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals sought to document the physiological responses to emotions. In specific, Chapter 7 addressed “Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair” with the chapter summary:
General effect of grief on the system–Obliquity of the eyebrows under suffering–On the cause of the obliquity of the eyebrows–On the depression of the corners of the mouth.
Charles Darwin. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: D. Appleton & Company. (1872): 176
Darwin’s review of responses allowed him to comment on Laocoön:
The ancient Greek sculptors were familiar with the expression, as shown in the statues of the Laocoon and Arretino; but, as Duchenne remarks, they carried the transverse furrows across the whole breadth of the forehead, and thus committed a great anatomical mistake
Darwin (1872): 183
He provides for artistic license as a plausible reason for the impossible exaggeration:
It is, however, more probable that these wonderfully accurate observers intentionally sacrificed truth for the sake of beauty, than that they made a mistake; for rectangular furrows on the forehead would not have had a grand appearance on the marble.
Darwin (1872): 183
Darwin’s approach was scientific. For him, the statue was an example of art depicting emotion, just incorrectly.
Almost one-hundred years earlier, Ephraim Gotthold Lessing (1766) wrote his treatise on Laocoön, in critical response to Johann Joachim Winckelmann. I am not terribly interested in their debate on aesthetics[2], but Lessing makes pointed observations on the cultural differences in expressing pain. Lessing asserts:
A cry is the natural expression of physical pain. Homer’s wounded warriors not infrequently fall to the ground with a cry. Venus shrieks aloud at a mere scratch [Iliad V. 343], not because she must be made to represent the tender goddess of sensuality, but because suffering nature must have her due. Even iron Mars screams so horribly on feeling the lance of Diomedes that it sounds like the shouting of ten thousand raging warriors and fills both armies with terror [Iliad V. 859].
Lessing, 1766: 3-4
Even the Greek gods are sensitive to pain and express anguish audibly. This is in stark contrast to the Germanic sensibilities:
I know that we more refined Europeans of a wiser, later age know better how to govern our mouths and our eyes. Courtesy and propriety force us to restrain our cries and tears. The aggressive bravery of the rough, early ages has become in our time a passive courage of endurance.
Lessing, 1766: 4
And whence this aggressive bravery turned passive courage?
Yet even our ancestors were greater in the latter than the former. But our ancestors were barbarians. To master all pain, to face death’s stroke with unflinching eye, to die laughing under the adder’s bite, to weep neither at the loss of one’s dearest friend nor at one’s own sins: these are the traits of old Nordic heroism. Palnatoko decreed that his Jomsburghers were not to fear anything nor even so much as mention the word “fear.”
Lessing, 1766: 4
I smiled reading that paragraph. Only because I just binge-watched Vikings (2013-2020) did I understand Lessing’s reference.
Vikings starts with the exploits of Ragnar Lothbrok (Lodbrok) who sired sons who carry the series (and are historical) forward. It is Ragnar who “mastered all pain” when tortured and was executed by being cast in a pit to die “under the adder’s bite” by King Ælla of Northumbria. Palnatoko (Palnatoke) is the legendary hero of the Jómsvíkinga saga (Jomsburghers) which tells the struggle for power and control over Denmark and Norway – plot drivers for the series.
These Vikings embrace death and do not fear it because a warrior’s death assures entry to Valhalla. There is a wonderful blurring in the series between the pagan belief in Odin All-Father and the Father of All, the Christian god – they are presented as providing equal solace to human suffering. Belief in either can banish fear and provide succor to suffering with equal effect.
Not so the Greek! He felt and feared, and he expressed his pain and grief. He was not ashamed of any human weakness, but it must not prevent him from attaining honor nor from fulfilling his duty. The Greek acted from principles whereas the barbarian acted out of his natural ferocity and callousness. In the Greek, heroism was like the spark hidden in the flint, which sleeps quietly as long as no external force awakens it, and robs it of its clarity or its coldness. In the barbarian, heroism was a bright, consuming, and ever-raging flame which devoured, or at least blackened, every other fine quality in him.
Lessing, 1766: 5
Ragnar and his sons are driven by the need for recognition by heroic deeds – hence their constant striving and drive to move beyond. Achilles may start the Illiad seeking eternal fame, he actively decided his fate, but that was the decision of a brash teenager. By the end of the epic, we see him reconcile with Priam precisely because of shared grief: both having lost; Achilles, Patroclus – Priam, Hector. Lessing explains:
The poet has a deeper meaning. He would show us that only the civilized Greek can weep and yet be brave …
Lessing, 1766: 5
The Greek presentation of suffering is humanizing. Regardless of its impossibility, the depicted agony Laocoön endures shows us suffering as an undeniable common experience. For the Nord and Christian alike, suffering could be a key to a new kingdom.[3] The Greek knew the futility of suffering – there was no higher realm after death – agony was real, it had no intrinsic or existential value. Relief from suffering was granted only by the grace of your fellow man. Humanity defined by hospitality – xenia.
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[1] The history of the statue is much in question. The earliest reference is by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History where he lauded it as “a work that may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of [bronze] statuary.” However, it isn’t clear whether the sculpture he saw was a Greek original creation or a Roman copy of a long-lost masterwork. In 1506, the statue was re-discovered buried in a vineyard. Pope Julius II dispatched a team of experts to oversee their excavation, including Michelangelo (see below).
[2] Lessing’s essay expands on the differences between the poetic and plastic arts (painting and sculpture). Using Laocoön and His Sons as the canonical example, he argues that it demonstrates the very different challenges faced by a visual artist from those that confront a writer. Lessing insists a writer can describe torment in as great detail as he wishes, a sculptor or painter can depict only a single frozen instance and thus must manipulate emotion to elicit our pity. Sculpted accurately Laocoön’s pain would be ugly – evoking the viewer’s disgust. “The demands of beauty,” Lessing insists, “could not be reconciled with the pain in all its disfiguring violence… the distress should be transformed, through beauty, into the tender feeling of pity.” Lessing’s arguments need to be revisited given cinema: the plastic and written arts have blended in ways his aesthetic theory did not contemplate. As indicated by the banner image which is a single frame of a mildly erotic video that plays on the columns of the main lobby of the Cosmopolitan.
[2] Michelangelo completed David before he ever saw Laocoön and some art historians claim it influenced him tremendously. They cite the posturing of the Dying Slave (1513), for example, but the facial expression remains beatific as the Pietà (1499). I see no deeper understanding of the human experience of suffering – rather Michelangelo continues with a Christian motif depicting suffering as a gateway without showing real agony.
Protective Arts 