The sculptors of the Laocoon are among the priests of Athena Lindia, whose names are recorded by inscriptions.
The Iliu Persis, again, was the oldest authority for the story of Laocoon and of the consequent escape of Aeneas - a story which connected a surviving branch of the house of Priam with the later inhabitants of the Troad.
Among others of the name may be mentioned (3) Athenodorus Of Teos, who played the cithara at the wedding of Alexander the Great and Statira at Susa (324 B.C.); (4) a Greek physician of the 1st century A.D., who wrote on epidemic diseases; and two sculptors, of whom (5) one executed the statues of Apollo and Zeus which the Spartans dedicated at Delphi after Aegospotami; and (6) the other was a son of Alexander of Rhodes, whom he helped in the Laocoon group.
The date of the Laocoon being now fixed (see Agesander) to 40-20 B.C., there can be no question of copying Virgil.
Such, too, in the Cypria are the new legendary figures - Palamedes, Iphigenia, Telephus, Laocoon.