If it be proved beyond a doubt that Craterus and Pythodorus, Polydectes and Hermolaus, with the rest, lived at the time of the emperors whose palaces they adorned with their admirable works, then I think we can assign no other date to those artists, the sculptors of the Laocoon, whose names Pliny connects with these by the word similiter. For if Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus were really such old masters as Winkelmann supposes, it would be the height of impropriety for an author, who makes great account of precision of expression, to leap from them to the most modern artists, merely with the words “in like manner.”
But it may be urged that this similiter has no reference to a common date, but to some other circumstance common to all these masters, who yet in age were widely different. Pliny, it may be said, is speaking of artists who had worked in partnership, and on this account had not obtained the fame they merited. The names of all had been left in neglect, because no one artist could appropriate the honor of the common work, and to mention the names of all the participators would require too much time (quoniam nec unus occupat gloriam, nec plures pariter nuncupari possunt). This had been the fate of the sculptors of the Laocoon, as well as of the many other masters whom the emperors had employed in the decoration of their palaces.
But, granting all this, the probabilities are still in favor of the supposition that Pliny meant to refer only to the later artists whose labors had been in common. If he had meant to include older ones, why confine himself to the sculptors of the Laocoon?
Why not mention others, as Onatas and Calliteles, Timocles and Timarchides, or the sons of this Timarchides, who together had made a statue of Jupiter at Rome?[[176]] Winkelmann himself says that a long list might be made of older works which had more than one father.[[177]] And would Pliny have thought but of the single example of Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, if he had not meant to confine himself strictly to the more modern masters?
If ever a conjecture gained in probability from the number and magnitude of the difficulties solved by it, this one, that the sculptors of the Laocoon flourished under the first emperors, has that advantage in a high degree. For had they lived and worked in Greece at the time which Winkelmann assigns to them, had the Laocoon itself existed earlier in Greece, then the utter silence of the Greeks with regard to such a work, “surpassing all the results of painting or statuary” (opere omnibus et picturæ et statuariæ artis præponendo), is most surprising. It is hard to believe that such great masters should have created nothing else, or that the rest of their works should have been, equally with the Laocoon, unknown to Pausanias. In Rome, on the contrary, the greatest masterpiece might have remained long concealed. If the Laocoon had been finished as early as the time of Augustus, there would be nothing surprising in Pliny’s being the first, and, indeed, the last, to mention it. For remember what he tells[[178]] of a Venus by Scopas, which stood in the temple of Mars at Rome:
... “quemcunque alium locum nobilitatura. Romæ quidem magnitudo operum eam obliterat, ac magni officiorum negotiorumque acervi omnes a contemplatione talium abducunt: quoniam otiosorum et in magno loci silentio apta admiratio talis est.”
Those who would fain see in the group an imitation of Virgil’s Laocoon will readily catch at what I have been saying, nor will they be displeased at another conjecture which just occurs to me. Why should not Asinius Pollio, they may think, have been the patron who had Virgil’s Laocoon put into marble by Greek artists? Pollio was a particular friend of the poet, survived him, and appears to have written an original work on the Æneid. For whence but from such a work could the various comments have been drawn which Servius quotes from that author?[[179]] Pollio was, moreover, a lover of art and a connoisseur, possessed a valuable collection of the best of the old masterpieces, ordered new works from the artists of his day, and showed in his choice a taste quite likely to be pleased by so daring a piece as the Laocoon,[[180]] “ut fuit acris vehementiæ, sic quoque spectari monumenta sua voluit.”
Since, however, the cabinet of Pollio in Pliny’s day, when the Laocoon was standing in the palace of Titus, seems to have existed entire in a separate building, this supposition again loses something of its probability. Why might not Titus himself have done what we are trying to ascribe to Pollio?
XXVII.
A little item first brought to my notice by Winkelmann himself confirms me in my opinion that the sculptors of the Laocoon lived at the time of the emperors, or at least could not date from so early a period as he assigns them. It is this:[[181]] “In Nettuno, the ancient Antium, Cardinal Alexander Albani discovered in 1717 in a deep vault, which lay buried under the sea, a vase of the grayish black marble now called bigio, wherein the Laocoon was inlaid. Upon this vase is the following inscription:—