Free The March of Folly by Barbara W. Tuchman

version, the lintel of the Scean Gate removed to allow it to enter. This is the first warning omen, for it has been prophesied that if ever the Scean lintel is taken down, Troy will fall.
    Excited voices from the gathering crowd cry, “Burn it! Hurl it over the rocks into the sea! Cut it open! “ Opponents shout as loudly in favor of preserving what they take to be a sacred image. Then occurs a dramatic intervention. Laocoon, a priest of Apollo’s temple, comes rushing down from the citadel crying in alarm, “Are you mad, wretched people? Do you think the foe has gone? Do you think gifts of the Greeks lack treachery? What was Odysseus’ reputation?
    “Either the Greeks are hiding in this monster
,
Or it’s some trick of war, a spy or engine
,
To come down on the city. Tricky business

Is hiding in it. Do not trust it, Trojans;

Do not believe this horse. Whatever it may be
,
I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts.”
    With that warning that has echoed down the ages, he flings his spear with all his strength at the Horse, in whose flank it sticks quivering and setting off a moaning sound from the frightened souls within. The blow almost split the wood and let light into the interior, but fate or the gods blunted it; or else, as Aeneas says later, Troy would still be standing.
    Just as Laocoon has convinced the majority, guards drag in Sinon, an ostensibly terrified Greek who pretends he has been left behind through the enmity of Odysseus, but who has actually been planted by Odysseus as part of his plan. Asked by Priam to tell the truth about the Wooden Horse, Sinon swears it is a genuine offering to Athena which the Greeks deliberately made huge so the Trojans would
not
take it into their city because that would signify an ultimate Trojan victory. If the Trojans destroy it they will doom themselves, but if they bring it inside they will ensure their city’s safety.
    Swung around by Sinon’s story, the Trojans are wavering between the warning and the false persuasion when a fearful portent convinces them that Laocoon is wrong. Just as he cautions that Sinon’s tale is another trick put into his mouth by Odysseus, two horrible serpents rise in gigantic black spirals out of the waves and advance across the sands,
    Their burning eyes suffused with blood and fire
,
Their darting tongues licking their hissing mouths
.
    As the crowd watches paralyzed in terror, they make straight for Laocoon and his two young sons, “fastening their fangs in those poor bodies,” coiling around the father’s waist and neck and arms and, as he utters strangled inhuman cries, crush him to death. The appalled watchers are now nearly all moved to believe that the ghastly event is Laocoon’s punishment for sacrilege in striking what must indeed be a sacred offering.
    Troublesome even to the ancient poets, the serpents have defied explanation; myth has its mysteries too, not always resolved. Some narrators say they were sent by Poseidon at Athena’s request to prove that his animus against the Trojans was equal to hers. Others say they were sent by Apollo to warn the Trojans of approaching doom (although, since the effect worked the other way, this seems to have a built-in illogic). Virgil’s explanation is that Athena herself was responsible in order to convince the Trojans of Sinon’s story, thus sealing their doom, and in confirmation he has the serpents take refuge in hertemple after the event. So difficult was the problem of the serpents that some collaborators of the time suggested that Laocoon’s fate had nothing to do with the Wooden Horse, but was owed to the quite extraneous sin of profaning Apollo’s temple by sleeping with his wife in front of the god’s image.
    The blind bard of the
Odyssey
, who knows nothing of Laocoon, simply states that the argument in favor of welcoming the Horse had to prevail because Troy was ordained to perish—or, as we might interpret it, that mankind in the form of Troy’s citizens is