The Trojans were moved to pity--they spared the traitor’s life; only, in return, King Priam adjured him to tell them the true intent of the Horse. Sinon declared that the Greeks had meant to set it up themselves, an offering to Minerva, within the Trojan citadel when they should have captured it; it behoved the Trojans now to seize it and drag it within the walls: for, if this were done, then--so ran the oracles--Asia should avenge itself upon Europe, and the Greeks in their turn should be besieged in their homes.[17] The traitor’s tale was all too easily believed. There came, too, a fearful omen, which hurried the Trojans to adopt this false counsel. The priest Laocoon, who had dared to strike the wooden monster, was seized, while offering sacrifice to Neptune, with his two sons, by two huge sea-serpents (so old is the belief, false or true, in these apocryphal monsters), which came sailing in to the beach from the direction of Tenedos. In the description which the poet gives of their movements at sea, we seem to be reading a versified extract from the log of some modern sea-captain:-- “Amid the waves they rear their breasts, And toss on high their sanguined crests;[18] The hind-part coils along the deep, And undulates with sinuous sweep.” The two unhappy youths are first caught and strangled--then the father. The legend is well known to others besides students of the Æneid, from the marble group of the Laocoon; which, however, does not tell the story in the same way, or in so probable a shape, as the poet does, since it represents the reptiles as embracing all three victims at once in their folds. Then, with glad shouts and songs of youths and maidens, the huge monster was dragged over a breach made purposely in the walls of Troy. Yet not without a voice of warning, disregarded, from Cassandra, daughter of King Priam, who had the gift of prophecy, and whose fate it was, like so many prophets in their own families, to prophesy in vain--nor without difficulties which might in themselves have well been considered presages of evil:-- “Four times ’twas on the threshold stayed; Four times the armour clashed and brayed; Yet press we on, with passion blind, All forethought blotted from our mind, Till the dread monster we install Within the temple’s tower-built wall.”