Brilliant and Settis are no exception: both explicitly endorse the "new" "Laocoon" in broad terms, though Brilliant would opt for a slightly more radical rearrangement of the three figures; and they apparently see no need to produce any particular argument in favour of the authenticity of the Pollak arm. In each case, this is a rare lapse. For both My Laocoon and Laocoonte, in their different intellectual styles (Brilliant working at the intersection of art history, philosophy of art, and aesthetics; Settis in an Italian tradition of classics and cultural history), offer consistently perceptive analyses not just of the sculpture in its ancient context, but also of "Laocoon" as an object of intense debate and controversy over the past 500 years. Brilliant, especially, approaches it as a paradigm object, raising central issues of art history and theory: identification, imitation, iconography, dating and response. The sculpture amounts to, in his words, "a topos for the analysis of interpretation itself".

It is an excellent subject for that project. Almost every aspect of the "Laocoon" has been hotly contested at some point since its rediscovery. Even the apparently simple "fact" that the sculpture described by Pliny is one and the same as the Vatican "Laocoon" has not proved quite so simple. True, the subject matter matches (Laocoon, sons and writhing serpents); and the find spot, though vague in the Renaissance sources, could conceivably be compatible with a "palace of Titus". The problem is that Pliny claims his statue to be made out of one block of marble ("ex uno lapide"), while "our" "Laocoon" is certainly not. Almost since the moment of discovery, the possible explanations for this have been clear: either Pliny was wrong; or "ex uno lapide" does not mean what we think it does; or the "Laocoon" that Pliny saw was not ours, but some other version of this famous subject that no longer survives. Settis plunges in to argue (probably rightly) that, in Latin, "ex uno lapide" is a well-known conceit, signalling a tour de force, and should not be taken literally.

Brilliant stands back from the fray to reflect more generally on how the existence of such a text inevitably affects our understanding of a work of art.

Pliny's text also raises issues of dating and originality. He names three Rhodian artists - at first assumed to be the artists who sculpted "our" statue at some disputed date, but obviously before Pliny wrote in the mid-first century ad. But what if, as many critics have since imagined, the Vatican "Laocoon" is a "copy" of some earlier Greek "original"? In that case, were Pliny's sculptors responsible for the "original" or the "copy"? And how do we explain the fact that the same three names were found inscribed on the base of one of those piles of marble fragments at Sperlonga? And can we possibly feed in the tantalizingly coincidental fact that the Emperor Tiberius is known to have had a narrow escape when some cave in which he was dining at Sperlonga collapsed? Theories proliferate wildly, and dates at least three centuries apart have been seriously put forward for our "Laocoon". Most notorious of all, proposed in a whole stream of publications over the last thirty years, are the theories of Bernard Andreae, one time Director of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome and heavily involved in reassembling the fragments from Sperlonga into recognizable sculpture. On very little evidence indeed, Andreae claims the Vatican "Laocoon" to be a copy of a bronze original, commissioned by the King of Pergamum in c140 bc - aimed, he speculates, at harmonizing Pergamene-Roman relations by an appeal to common Trojan origins. For him, Pliny's three Rhodians were the copyists, working on their marble version during the reign of Tiberius, at the same time as they were decorating the Sperlonga cave (now confidently identified as the site of the ill-fated dinner party), as an imperial commission, with sculptural themes "pertinent to Tiberius' life story".

Neither Brilliant nor Settis has much truck with any of this (it is perhaps double-edged when Brilliant calls Andreae "the Winckelmann of the twentieth century"). And neither believes that searching for "originals" and "copies", in any simple sense, is a particularly useful procedure in the complex artistic world of the Roman Empire. None the less, Settis plunges in again and argues directly against Andreae. A good proportion of his own text (only eighty pages of Laocoonte are actually written by Settis himself, the rest taken up by long appendices written and edited by others) consists in an attempt to prove, on epigraphic evidence, that our "Laocoon" is an "original" work of the late first century bc. Brilliant once more stays aloof, offering no preferred date of his own. In many ways this is the single most striking achievement of My Laocoon: to show the reader, by example, that fixing the date of a Roman sculpture is not the most important, or even a necessary, art historical question.

There remains in the end, however, a sense that both Brilliant and Settis have pulled punches they might have delivered. Their shared commitment to the history of responses to "Laocoon" leads them to take seriously a number of positions (Andreae's included) which in other contexts would have deserved polite ridicule. The truth is that a good proportion of recent writing on this sculpture should be pilloried as much as it is analysed. If anyone wishes to see the force of a clever satire on these contributions, they should consult a recent issue of the periodical Antike Welt, where Tonio Holscher (Professor of Art History at the University of Heidelberg) returns to the "Laocoon", with a whole series of political readings that outstrip even Andreae (what if we see "Laocoon" and his sons standing for Augustus, with his failed heirs Gaius and Lucius? is the elder boy (Gaius?) an older version of the Cupid that crawls up Augustus' leg in the Prima Porta statue?) Attentive readers, however, will not have worried. Alerted by the flagrantly "old" restoration of "Laocoon" that illustrates the article, they will soon have spotted that the first letter of each paragraph forms an entirely appropriate acrostic (in German): "Praise be to nonsense."