The exploration was carried on under difficulties of several kinds. The Italian budget for archaeology is notoriously inadequate; the cave was subject to flooding from springs, and lashing by winter storms; and it contained a dangerous quantity of ammunition and explosives stored there in World War II. The first difficulty was temporarily overcome by the generosity of the engineer in charge of the road-building nearby; the second by installing three pumps and building a dike; the third by keeping an ordnance expert constantly on duty. [Illustration: FIG. 7.1 Sperlonga, Cave “of Tiberius.” (G. Iacopi, _I ritrovamenti_, etc., Fig. 8)] [Illustration: FIG. 7.2 Sperlonga, Cave “of Tiberius,” reconstruction. (G. Iacopi, _op. cit._, Fig. 18)] When the finds from the cave were first reported in the press, great excitement was caused by the announcement--premature, as it turned out--that among the fragments of sculpture were some resembling the Laocoön group. The original Laocoön group had been described by Pliny the Elder as carved out of a single block, probably with the sculptors’ names on the base, whereas the famous Vatican Laocoön is not monolithic and is unsigned. Among the Sperlonga finds, on the other hand, were fragments of a Greek inscription giving the names of the three Rhodian sculptors mentioned by Pliny (but not in the precise form transcribed by him: in the Sperlonga inscriptions, their fathers’ names are recorded, in Pliny not), plus some colossal pieces (the central figure would have been nineteen feet eight inches tall) including parts of two snake-like monsters, presumably the serpents sent by Athena to punish Laocoön and his sons for resisting the proposal to drag the Wooden Horse within the walls of Troy. This great group, much larger, earlier (according to Iacopi, on the somewhat doubtful evidence of the letter-styles of the Greek inscription, which he would date in the second or first century B.C.) than the Vatican version, and different in conception, fits the pedestal in the middle of the circular pool.