FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:14 am

Part 1 of 6

Inside Criminal Minds ... Con Men
[The Cunning Genius Who Fooled The Art World: John Myatt]
Narration by Anthony Wilson
by Real Crime
Apr 5, 2022

The first episode investigates the story of John Myatt, a painter who produced forged works of art for dealer John Drew. Lifting the lid on one of the 20th-century's biggest contemporary art frauds, it reveals that Myatt painted around 200 forgeries while Drewe managed to con esteemed experts in some of Britain's prestigious art auction establishments.



Transcript

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[Narrator] Con men, the most devious of all criminals. Charming, cool, and calculating, they betray trust and devastate lives, yet remain a complete enigma. We are about to explore the mysterious world of these master criminals, giving an unprecedented insight into the workings of the complex minds of some of the world's most cunning con men. We will reveal the detail and the intricacies of their elaborate crimes, and uncover how they were brought dramatically to justice. In this show, we tell the startling and incredible truth behind the Twentieth century's biggest art fraud.

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A struggling artist was drawn into a con, would make millions, with the artist and con man secretly working together for almost a decade, creating fake paintings that would sell as recently discovered works by master artists,

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fooling the international art world, and leaving them devastated and utterly humiliated.

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[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] In terms of 20th century art fraud, John Drewe and the John Myatt case, must rank right at the top.

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[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] But the problem is, we were being scammed by a very intelligent person on multi levels.

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[John Myatt] Unbelievable that, uh, people would be looking at paintings painted in the same kind of stuff that you put on your walls basically, and authenticating them.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] If I had been a dealer, I'd have most certainly been fooled.

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[Narrator] The sophistication and intricacy of this incredible scam saw forgeries of famous artists such as Ben Nicholson, and Albert Giacometti, painted in emulsion, and covered in tea, coffee, and hoover dust, audaciously passed off as original oil paintings under the art world's noses.

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The con was masterminded by a cool and calculating criminal, with an IQ of One-Hundred Sixty-Five, whose name was John Drewe. He enticed struggling, cash-strapped, single-parent John Myatt into his intricate, and almost foolproof scam.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard]John Drewe has got a huge amount of, um, for want of another word, "front."

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[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] But he's very, very dangerous, because he's a fantasist. He's quite happy to scam money out of anybody.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] But there must be an element of intellectual one-up-manship.

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[Joel Levy, Con Expert] And putting one over on people who probably thought themselves to be very smart, and he probably thought, you know, that he'd made them look like idiots. And that made him feel great.

[Narrator] Mastermind John Drewe took the artcon to a whole new level. His master stroke was the infiltration of the British art archives. He secured access, then simply rewrote history to authenticate his bogus paintings. This shocked the art world to its core.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] Basically, it's art historical revisionism. So he's changing history. He's changing art history.

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[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] He went to enormous lengths to authenticate the pictures, and to change the authenticity of them, and the invoice that goes around with them, in order to make those paintings believable. And the idea of taking on the art world, and of all these superior intellects, and to actually get the better of them, must have been irresistible to him.

[John Myatt] How the hell we ever got away with it, I just don't know.

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Sugnall, Staffordshire, England

[Narrator] The story of what has been dubbed, "The Greatest Contemporary Art Forgery of the Twentieth Century begins in the unlikeliest of places: here in leafy Stafford England back in the mid-1980s. Over Two Hundred paintings will be forged by a cash-strapped, single parent, called John Myatt.

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Myatt's intentions began honorably enough: a single parent, raising his family, he decided to try to earn money to support his two young children while working at home.

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He placed an advertisement in the UK magazine, "Private Eye," offering his services as an artist who reproduced copies of famous paintings.

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[John Myatt] The advert said, "Genuine Fakes, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century paintings from One-Hundred Fifty pounds," the first time I put it in.

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And the second time I put it in it said, "Nineteenth and Twentieth Century paintings from Two-Hundred Fifty pounds," what with prices up a bit.

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I think it was about a year-and-a-half into it when I got a phone call from Mr. Drewe. And the only difference between any other customer, and Mr. Drewe, was that he just kept on coming back.

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[Narrator] John Drewe, a man with a brilliant mind, and an IQ of One-Hundred-Sixty-Five, was born John Cockett.

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Throughout his life, he worked in jobs he wasn't legitimately qualified for, but always convinced his employers otherwise.

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[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] Drewe did have all the hallmarks of a really good con man. He was utterly believable, and plausible. He could tell extremely complicated lies, and keep those lies going, remembering everything he told.

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[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] He taught Physics "A" level at a school in north London, and I don't think he has -- I think he's got Physics "O" level. And the irony of this is that he actually taught it quite well.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] John Drewe showed very clearly, from early on, that he disliked authority. He didn't like working for anybody else. He wanted to work for himself. He was clearly arrogant in that respect.

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[Joel Levy, Con Expert] I mean it sounds as though, um, Drewe was so sure of himself, and so convinced of his own superiority, which was backed up, I suppose, if you like, by the fact that he was successful. For him, that was evidence that he was a cut above everyone else. That he was a few steps ahead.

[Narrator] When he contacted John Myatt, Drewe, now in his thirties, was masquerading as a professor of nuclear physics, who needed paintings to decorate his home. In reality, he was a master con man, preparing the ground to lure in the man who would be the key to the next scam he was planning.

[John Myatt] He was one of the most exciting people I'd ever met. He was so interesting. It was a bit like going to the movies, really. You're going to see him, John Drewe, every three weeks or so. As time went by, I got to know him better. I stopped meeting him in Houston Station, and I used to meet him in Golders Green Station. And then he'd take me to his house. And we'd have a meal, I'd meet his children; I'd meet his wife. And the only thing, I think, I remember him saying was -- this is a long time ago, of course, "Don't tell my wife that you painted these, will you? I'm just telling her that you're an art expert who's come to look over the paintings, and stuff." When you bear in mind that most customers were good for about two paintings, this was really quite exceptional.

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And in the end, he seemed to just run out of ideas . And, uh, he said, "Well, what would you like to do next, John?" So I looked through, and found some drawings -- cubist drawings. and It struck me that I could turn these into paintings. Not just copying something, which is just stupid, you know, but actually creating something new from a drawing.

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And I remember it was in a little oval thing -- about that big, maybe. I painted this -- it was by a German cubist, that very few people had heard of, called Albert Gleizes.

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[Narrator] It was after this -- the ninth commission -- the painting in the style of the little known cubist artist Albert Gleizes, that John Myatt received a phone call from his best customer -- a phone call from John Drewe that would change Myatt's life forever, and turn an innocent hobby into a devious, and criminal life of dishonesty.

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[John Myatt] The phone rang, and he said, "You know that Albert Gleizes painting that I bought off you? Well, I've taken it into Christie's, and they say it's a very interesting work, and they'll sell it for , pounds. So, you know, would you rather have Two-Hundred-and-Fifty, or would you like Twelve-and-a-half-thousand?" You know, with hindsight, that was where I made my mistake.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:22 am

Part 2 of 6

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] Drewe was very clever in the way that he targeted Myatt, and built up a genuine relationship of trust with him. He paid him a relatively normal sum of money for the copies that he was making, and they built up a relationship together.

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It wasn't till that moment, where he offered him twelve-and-a-half-thousand-pounds for the painting, and sucked him into the con, and used Myatt's weaknesses, that the whole relationship, and the con, really started.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] So he made him offer he couldn't refuse, effectively. And then once Myatt had done this deal with the devil, if you like, he was already implicated. And it was probably a lot harder for him to back out.

[John Myatt] I should have said, "Oh, come on. This is painted in emulsion paint. I haven't used original oil paints. None of the materials are original. Anyway, it's a crime, you know. You don't do that kind of stuff. But I don't know, um.

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Something in me just sort of went, "pop", and I thought, "Yeah, that's good, that is. I like the idea of twelve-and-a-half -- I've never seen twelve-and-a-half-thousand-pounds. Well, I've never seen that kind of money. And I got all excited about having all this money. I wasn't selling it to anybody. I mean, as far as, you know, I didn't have anything to do with walking into Sotheby's or anything. I was just painting them. So I suppose, you know, it was turning a blind eye with a vengeance to what was really going on.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] I think it's easy to feel that maybe this is a victimless crime, because art theft is, you know, a very affluent area. People can afford to lose a few paintings here and there.

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But there are two areas where it really is very damaging. Firstly, on an individual who's paid a lot of money, and put a lot of trust in an expert, and believes they're getting something, you know, very valuable for their money. And secondly, the impact on the art world itself. There's been an enormous distrust now on the provenances of these paintings, and of any paintings, because of the effect of what John Drewe has done.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] The classic artist thinks that it is a victimless crime. And they often rationalize what they've done, by saying they haven't really done a crime, and nobody's got hurt. And it's easy to think that way. Especially if you're scamming rich people, or businesses, for instance. It's quite easy to portray it as a victimless crime. Because you could say, well "Well, you know, they could afford it," or "their insurance will cover it."

[Narrator] Myatt's fateful decision was one he regrets to this day. Tempted by the prospect of accumulating vast wealth, Myatt agreed to Drewe's proposal. They were now partners-in-crime.

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Little did Myatt know the enormity of the scale of the scam which was to come, and the terrible price he would eventually have to pay.

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But now, he was hooked in. There was no going back.

[John Myatt] It started there. If it had stopped there, of course, I don't think, you know, I'd be talking to you now, or be talking to anybody else about it.

[Narrator] For almost ten years, con man John Drewe fooled the art world with a complex and intricate scam, passing off fake paintings as famous artist's work. It was a con of such magnitude and importance, that the art world is still reeling from the blow.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] John Drewe was a very clever man. I mean, he'd had an IQ of One-Hundred-Sixty-Five. And he created a very elaborate scam which showed an awful lot of depth of knowledge about the subject matter he was going into, which he wouldn't have had before.

[John Myatt] He had access to the best art bookshops in the country. And if there was an artist who particularly interested him -- for whatever reason -- then he'd buy an art book, and he'd turn down the page and say, "This is interesting. Why don't you look at that?" And that kind of thing.

[Narrator] Drewe's con would never have been possible if he had not courted, and enlisted, the help of artist John Myatt. Before the scam, Myatt was making a modest living, selling honest copies of art classics, legitimately.

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But when Christie's paid Drewe Twenty-Five-Thousand pounds for one of Myatt's fake paintings, believing it to be genuine, Myatt found the sum of twelve-and-a-half-thousand-pounds, just too tempting. He became part of Drewe's scam, painting new fakes of master artists for Drewe to sell as the real deal.

[John Myatt] I thought it was just exciting, and fun. It's unbelievable that people would be looking at paintings painted in the same kind of stuff that you put on your walls, basically, and authenticating them. I didn't use aged canvas. I didn't use authentic materials.

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I used KY jelly, which is water-based, to actually dilute the the paint if I needed a thin glaze.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] But the thing is, about household emulsion, paint -- it dries very quickly.

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If you varnish over it -- and he didn't always do the varnishing himself -- we believe Drewe did some of the varnishing -- if you varnish over it, it's very difficult, even for an art restorer, to know whether it's a real oil painting, or something totally different.

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[John Myatt] The way the paintings actually got treated after they left me was, you know, I mean, they were walked all over, and there was hoover dust emptied all over them, and occasionally I mean I would throw coffee and tea at the painting, and just grind it into the surface of the canvas.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] Allegedly, we heard from John Myatt, that John Drewe would empty the contents of his hoover onto the painting, and then varnish over it. Or maybe he did that when the varnish was still wet. He would scuff the frames.

[John Myatt] And the other thing that's worth mentioning, is the difference between a fake and a forgery.

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If you're doing forgery, there really has to be a lot of thought gone into the back of the painting, what a painting looks like from the back. A lot of people know what paintings look like from the front, but they're not quite so clear about what happens when you turn them the other way around. So that was another of, you know, John Drewe covered that as well. He would take the painting, and sort of disassemble it, put new stretchers on it, gallery stickers, signatures, and all this kind of thing on the back of the painting.

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[Narrator] But the paintings were only one element of the con. In a master stroke of cunning, Drewe painstakingly ensured that the legitimacy of the fake paintings were never questioned.

[John Myatt] The way he wanted to take it, you have to provide the paintings with a history with what they call a "provenance," which is pretty much the same as a service history with your car. You know, stamps in the book, and all the rest of it. And he made it his job to do that.

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[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] The point about authenticating a painting is, the first and most important thing is, looking at the picture, and judging the paint, the calligraphy, the way the brushstrokes are put on, and the color balance, etc., with authenticated works by the artist. The second most important thing, which is very important if the picture has provenance, histories of previous owners, especially if it takes you back to the artist, and also exhibitions the pictures have been in.

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So provenance is very important.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] And if you've got the provenance that's there, and the provenances were very, very professional. I've never seen anything like it. And if I had been a dealer, I'd have most certainly been fooled.

[Narrator] And to make the scam work, John Drewe presented himself as a darling of the art world.

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[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] John Drewe gave a donation of twenty thousand pounds to the Tate, and as a result of that, he was naturally thought of as a supporter of the arts. And he said he was interested in looking up the old archives -- which he did -- in the Tate. And he set to work. A very busy little bee.

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To my knowledge, the type of forgery of archival material, has never been done to this extent with paintings. And not on such a scale, and not so audacious.

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Because this was full-penetration of the Tate archives, and the V&A archives, and a number of other archives as well.

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[John Myatt] He would fabricate catalogues of exhibitions, by taking a catalogue out of an archive, inserting one of my new paintings into the catalogue, returning it to the archive, and then a researcher will say, "Oh yes, well, you know, that was obviously exhibited in in Brighton Art Gallery, or something, And that is the history which validates the painting -- however poor the quality.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] In retrospect, John Myatt's painting is not good at all. But the problem was, we were being scammed by a very intelligent person on multi levels.

[John Myatt] You know, I was on a learning curve, here. I hadn't done this before, you know. Okay, some of the paintings were good, but some of them were absolutely awful. I mean, really bad quality. How the hell we ever got away with it, I just don't know.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] The problem was, that people were no longer looking at the artwork.

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They were looking at the provenances.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] These paintings came to us with authentication certificates, from living experts, who were the number one experts on the artists.

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And, authentication all the way back. So in other words, your brains are being scrambled. You're saying, "Wait a minute -- it's been authenticated." And you're looking at it through rose-tinted spectacles that you wouldn't normally be doing.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] Se in black and white your painting in a book -- it's almost One-Hundred Percent genuine.

[Narrator] Drewe had devised the almost perfect con.

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Never before had the archives been tampered with in such a comprehensive way, that ensured even leading experts, accepted practically worthless forgeries, for the works of renowned artists, leading them to be sold for thousands of pounds each. The paintings were being sold through all the major auction houses in London, England, as well as Christie's and Sotheby's. Most paintings were sold for between ten thousand pounds and thirty thousand, whereas others fetch one hundred thousand pounds.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:22 am

Part 3 of 6

One of Myatt's Giacomettis sold at auction in New York, U.S.A., for three hundred thousand; over a hundred and fifty thousand pounds for a painting that took John Myatt just five hours.

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Another of Myatt's paintings -- this time of Ben Nicholson -- is alleged to have also sold in the U.S.A. for One Hundred and Five Thousand pounds.

[John Myatt] It was pretty unbelievable, you know, when John Drewe said that he'd taken such and such a painting to a world expert, and this person had authenticated the painting. I just thought it was just absurd -- but I mean, funny almost. Yeah, I mean you have to laugh, don't you? I do find it hard to laugh sometimes, because there's such vast amounts of money involved in all this.

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But, you know, some of these people just don't know what they're talking about.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] If somebody wants to scam you, and take money off you, and has really worked out how to do it, the problem [is], they probably will -- whether they're a brilliant salesman, or something else.

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[Narrator] The scale of the scam was unprecedented, and the art world was none the wiser for now.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] It covered a whole spectrum of artists, mainly modern British. But in all, we reckoned he'd done about Two Hundred.

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[Narrator] And with so many paintings to handle, Drewe had to evade suspicion by involving other people, who were none the wiser to the con.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] What happened was that John Drewe set up a number of runners to go to all the auction houses.

[John Myatt] There was no good him going in every time -- the same face saying, "Well, here's another painting."

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He had to recruit a group of people who didn't know that these paintings were fakes at all. In the end, I think, he told them that he represented a consortium of art collectors.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] The first picture I bought from Drewe's stooge, was part of a group that Christie's had sold for a lot of money. And I got it authenticated by Christie's. It cost me about five and a half thousand pounds.

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That represents a total loss to me.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] I'm sure money always plays a huge part in all of these these cons. People wouldn't do it if there was no money involved -- most of the time.

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In my experience, money is a very, very large factor.

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But there must be an element of intellectual one-upmanship.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] And I think that was probably one of his main motivating factors. It probably wasn't money. It was probably getting a thrill out of it. Getting a buzz out of successfully pulling off his cons, and putting one over on people who probably thought themselves to be very smart. And he probably thought, you know, that he'd made them look like idiots, and that made him feel great.

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The classic characteristic of a con man is this need to feel that you are better than the average Joe, basically. Joe on the street. You're a step ahead. You don't have to work for a living. You, unlike all those other schmoes, you don't have to punch in and punch out. And you're not some lowly criminal either, you know. You're not using violence. You're not breaking and entering. You're not even doing real crime. You're just using your wits. And you're cleverer than the other guy. It's kind of circular logic, because they weren't able to guard themselves against it. Because they fell for it. Therefore, they had it coming. Therefore, it served them right.

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And that's the kind of twisted psychology that really goes on a lot in the con artist's mind.

[John Myatt] I think he was a superb con man. I think he was able to persuade other people that he knew their area of expertise. If he was talking to a GP, he would persuade the GP that he knew something about medicine. If he was talking to a tax accountant, the tax accountant thinks, "This is a man who knows about complicated tax law." He was just very gifted, like a chameleon in a way. He'd be what you wanted him to be.

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[Joel Levy, Con Expert] I mean perversely, this con obviously required all this sort of hard work, and intelligence, that would make someone a success in, you know, straight life, if you like.

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In non-criminal life. And so it's kind of perverse that these characteristics, these attributes, if you like, should be put to such devious ends.

[John Myatt] John Drewe really loved it. He loved the con -- wanted to do it over and over again. It wasn't that the money wasn't important to him, because I'm sure it was. I mean obviously, it was very important to him. But there was another thing to it as well. It was looking at the important people in the art world, and just knowing something that they didn't. And so it led him into the mistake of doing it over and over and over again.

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And of course, the more you do these kind of things, the more likely you are to get caught.

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[Narrator] The con was fully and successfully operational. But not all of the art world was absolutely convinced.

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And Myatt and Drewe's intricate scam was dramatically about to come unravelled.

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Peter Nahum, an art dealer in London, England, became suspicious when he was offered a second Ben Nicholson painting.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] We looked at this picture in detail. Ben Nicholson has a certain handwriting.

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They were beautifully signed in pencil -- as he does -- on the back. They had these labels. They had the authentication, etcetera. And suddenly the penny dropped, that this had exactly the same labels, from a completely different source, the same gallery labels from the s as the other one.

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And the chances of you looking at two Ben Nicholsons, and being offered them from completely different sources, with completely different provenances, having been in the same two exhibitions,

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are very, very, unlikely. Because these weren't major exhibitions. These were minor dealers exhibitions.

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Then we started analyzing the signature. And when you really looked at it, it started falling apart. It just wasn't quite right.

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And at this point, suddenly, all that information came together, and I called in the head of the Antique Squad.

[Narrator] But Peter Nahum wasn't the only person who was suspicious. The cracks in Myatt and Drewe's con were beginning to show.

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[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] There was another source in France: the Giacometti Institute, from Mary Lisa Palmer, who had one of the [in piedi nudos], and suspected a number of other Giacomettis as being fake.

[Narrator] Giacometti was a Swiss Italian artist who moved to Paris, France in 1922. The Giacometti Institute in Paris is responsible, among other things, for cataloguing the artist's work, as well as uncovering and stopping would-be forgers.

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Mary Lisa Palmer, the director of the Giacometti Association, had been sent a catalogue by Sotheby's in the UK,

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featuring a Giacometti standing nude.

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She instantly questioned its authenticity.

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[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] The painting that I saw was inconsistent. Like, the head looked like a man's head on a woman's body; the background was poor; the strokes were wishy-washy. When an artist paints, there's a lot of energy that goes into the painting. When a person copies, he's copying the work of somebody else. It's not at all the same energy in the painting itself.

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[John Myatt] The Giacomettis were so bad in quality that it didn't take anybody from the Giacometti Foundation to see that they were rubbish. I could see that they were rubbish, immediately!

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] Then it was signed, also; and the signature resembled other fake signatures, and not the real signature. When Albert Giacometti used to sign, he would sign quickly, you know. Get rid of it! He didn't like to sign paintings or drawings, so he did it quickly. The signature is very applied, you know, so copied.

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So I went to London to look at the work. I looked at the front of the canvas, the back of the canvas. I asked for an X-ray. Then I told the people at Sotheby's that I thought it was a fake. And then they told me, "But, ah -- there are experts that think that it's okay, and you will find documents at the Tate gallery proving the provenance as being correct."
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:23 am

Part 4 of 6

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[John Myatt] Because he'd been so thorough with his paperwork, and created this history for them, people thought, "Oh, well -- it must be good, because this was exhibited in 1968 or 1961, wasn't it? And here is the paperwork to prove it."

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] So I went to the Tate Gallery to look at these documents. I did see a photograph of this painting slipped into the Tate Gallery archives. And from that moment on, I felt that they were being tampered with.

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Basically, if the painting was fake, then the provenance had to be fake.

Fake provenance is used to help authenticate a fake work of art. -- Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable, International Journal of Cultural Property, by Cambridge University Press


[Narrator] Mary Lisa Palmer now had to try and prove that the catalogues were bogus.

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[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] Well, I sort of had to play the detective part, because people would not believe that the provenance was fake, because they were "very well done," quote unquote. I had to try to prove that the paper was not from the 50s. So I had to look at the watermarks, and contact the paper companies.

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I had to check with the libraries whether this catalogue was in their archives. I had to write to the printers, to see if they printed the catalogue. I had to check with another foundation whether they had received the same provenance material. And I found out that they had a different date for the same catalogue.

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I also wrote to the post office in England to see if the stamps were used in the 50s.

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I went on and on and on in this sort of detail.

[Narrator] That sort of detail resulted in Mary Lisa Palmer's success.

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Experts confirmed that the paper used in the suspected fake catalogues was not from the 1950s, as they stated.

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She now had evidence that the provenance was corrupt.

[Narrator] But Peter Nahum wasn't the only person who was suspicious. The cracks in Myatt and Drewe's con were beginning to show.

[Narrator] Giacometti was a Swiss Italian artist who moved to Paris, France in 1922. The Giacometti Institute in Paris is responsible, among other things, for cataloguing the artist's work, as well as uncovering and stopping would-be forgers. Mary Lisa Palmer, the director of the Giacometti Association, had been sent a catalogue by Sotheby's in the UK, featuring a Giacometti standing nude. She instantly questioned its authenticity.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] The painting that I saw was inconsistent. Like, the head looked like a man's head on a woman's body; the background was poor; the strokes were wishy-washy. When an artist paints, there's a lot of energy that goes into the painting. When a person copies, he's copying the work of somebody else. It's not at all the same energy in the painting itself. Then it was signed, also; and the signature resembled other fake signatures, and not the real signature. When Albert Giacometti used to sign, he would sign quickly, you know. Get rid of it! He didn't like to sign paintings or drawings, so he did it quickly. The signature is very applied, you know, so copied. So I went to London to look at the work. I looked at the front of the canvas, the back of the canvas. I asked for an X-ray. Then I told the people at Sotheby's that I thought it was a fake. And then they told me, "But, ah -- there are experts that think that it's okay, and you will find documents at the Tate gallery proving the provenance as being correct." So I went to the Tate Gallery to look at these documents. I did see a photograph of this painting slipped into the Tate Gallery archives. And from that moment on, I felt that they were being tampered with. Basically, if the painting was fake, then the provenance had to be fake. Well, I sort of had to play the detective part, because people would not believe that the provenance was fake, because they were "very well done," quote unquote. I had to try to prove that the paper was not from the 50s. So I had to look at the watermarks, and contact the paper companies. I had to check with the libraries whether this catalogue was in their archives. I had to write to the printers, to see if they printed the catalogue. I had to check with another foundation whether they had received the same provenance material. And I found out that they had a different date for the same catalogue. I also wrote to the post office in England to see if the stamps were used in the 50s. I went on and on and on in this sort of detail.

[Narrator] That sort of detail resulted in Mary Lisa Palmer's success. Experts confirmed that the paper used in the suspected fake catalogues was not from the 1950s, as they stated. She now had evidence that the provenance was corrupt.

The Getty kouros is an over-life-sized statue in the form of a late archaic Greek kouros. The dolomitic marble sculpture was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, in 1985 for ten million dollars and first exhibited there in October 1986....

The kouros first appeared on the art market in 1983 when the Basel dealer Gianfranco Becchina offered the work to the Getty's curator of antiquities, Jiří Frel. Frel deposited the sculpture (then in seven pieces) at Pacific Palisades along with a number of documents purporting to attest to the statue's authenticity. These documents traced the provenance of the piece to a collection in Geneva of Dr. Jean Lauffenberger who, it was claimed, had bought it in 1930 from a Greek dealer. No find site or archaeological data was recorded. Amongst the papers was a suspect 1952 letter allegedly from Ernst Langlotz, then the preeminent scholar of Greek sculpture, remarking on the similarity of the kouros to the Anavyssos youth in Athens (NAMA 3851). Later inquiries by the Getty revealed that the postcode on the Langlotz letter did not exist until 1972, and that a bank account mentioned in a 1955 letter to an A.E. Bigenwald regarding repairs on the statue was not opened until 1963.

The documentary history of the sculpture was evidently an elaborate fake and therefore there are no reliable facts about its recent history before 1983. At the time of acquisition, the Getty Villa's board of trustees split over the authenticity of the work. Federico Zeri, founding member of board of trustees and appointed by Getty himself, left the board in 1984 after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought was rejected.


-- Getty kouros, by Wikipedia

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] She came over to London, almost immediately, with a huge amount of documentation, and photographs, of not only the genuine ones, but the fakes, which she reckoned matched up. And we then got our heads together, and she helped the police tremendously.

[Narrator] The net was tightening around the con men. But in an unexpected twist, the unequivocal proof of the con would come from the unlikeliest of sources. And Drew and Myatt's scam was to be dramatically blown apart.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] And that's one of the sad aspects of a con man's life.

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He can't afford to trust anyone.

[Narrator] For eight years, John Myatt and John Drewe colluded to achieve what has been dubbed "The Greatest Art Fraud of the 20th Century." The duo had no idea that suspicions were being roused within the art world. But forger John Myatt was becoming less and less comfortable with his partner-in-crime, John Drewe, and their joint deception.

[John Myatt, Forger] I was certain that it was going to end in, you know, tears. It was just a matter of, you know, when.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] As the con went on, the web of lies was obviously very complicated. But John Drewe had to sort of really fantasize, and put himself in the reality of it.

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And to him it was real. These paintings were genuine paintings.

[John Myatt, Forger] I remember, on one occasion, in an Italian restaurant, he was going on about a painting.

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And I said, "Come on, John. Just shut up for a minute. I painted these paintings. They're fakes."

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"Aaaahhh". And off he goes.

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He said, "No, no, no, no. You're wrong. These are not fake.

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I believe these are original paintings." And that was what he did! I guess that's the secret of being a success in that, you know, conning department.

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It's part of you has to sell to yourself, you know, across the sort of left side to the right side of the brain, or something. You have to persuade yourself that these are authentic paintings. And then you can be credible.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] The way that Drewe talked about, um, how "these weren't fakes -- they were real artworks," is maybe indicative that he was an example of what psychologists call, "fantasy prone personality." Now "fantasy prone personality" is someone who has trouble differentiating between fact and fantasy. And that he literally was not very good at telling the difference between his lies and the truth, and therefore, came to believe that his lies were the truth. Which of course would have made him a much more effective con man.

[John Myatt, Forger] I became more and more convinced we were going to get caught. So I backed off in the end. And I had a period of, uh, about a year. It was a lovely year. It was 1994 to 1995. So I remember it, rightly. And, um, it was like when you've been washed out to sea,

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and you turn around and you swim. And [makes huffing noises],...

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you suddenly put your feet down, and there's the sand. And you can actually walk back to the shore again. And you think, "Right. Now that's that now!

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That's all behind me. This is the rest of my life ahead of me." And I thought, "No one will ever -- this is -- I've got away with it! No one will ever know. It's done." But in London, things were happening that I didn't know anything about. Things were going on. Police were asking questions,

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and dealers were saying, "I'm not so sure about this painting," and so forth.

[Narrator] By 1995, John Myatt had fully removed himself from the con, and stopped working with John Drewe. But the art world, and the police, were gathering evidence, and getting closer to catching the con artists who had created an estimated 200 paintings, and doctored the UK's leading archives to make them seem legitimate. In a dramatic, and blind side twist, Myatt's and Drew's fates were sealed by an extraordinary blow from an unexpected source. John Drewe's common law wife, Bathsheba Gadsmith[?].

[John Myatt] Bathsheba was falling out with John big-time. And in the end, he was leaving home. And he left all the paperwork behind him. And she just crates it all up in a big plastic bag, gets in the back of her Mercedes, and chucks it out on the desk in some police station in ____, and says, "Now, you lot, I know that there's something dodgy going on here."

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] It's interesting that the way that he finally got rumbled was because his common-law wife shocked him.

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Because one of the first rules of being a con man is, "Don't get detached." The more other people are involved in your con, the more chances are that something will go wrong. And that's one of the sad aspects of a con man's life. He can't afford to trust anyone. And therefore, if he's going to be successful, he needs to go through life as a kind of a loner. But of course, what proved to be this guy's achilles' heel was his love interest.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] And she gave us a dustbin liner full of provenances, small negatives, photographs -- an enormous quantity of paper, and xerox sheets of paintings.

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This was a huge jigsaw puzzle which I sorted out at the Organized Crime Squad in the following weeks.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:23 am

Part 5 of 6

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[Narrator] The raft of evidence presented by Drewe's ex-partner, alongside the information provided by the likes of art experts Peter Nahum and Mary Lisa Palmer, created a chain reaction that unearthed further damning evidence when the police finally made their move one autumn morning in Stafford England.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] The paperwork pointed to John Myatt as being the perpetrator. So a team went up to Stafford to turn him over.

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[John Myatt] I'm lying in bed, about six o'clock. And there's a big bang on the door. And when I opened the bedroom window, and looked down, there's about people standing in the path.

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And a guy holds up this thing, and he says, "My name is Jonathan Searle. I'm from the Scotland Yard Arts and Antique Squad."

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] When I went into his house, I saw a beautiful little drawing that he had done of his son, with telephone numbers, and the rest of it scribbled over it. I knew at once that we got somebody who could draw beautifully. If you can draw well, you can paint.

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And then I looked up the stairs and I saw a Giacometti hanging on the wall. So, we were in. We knew exactly that this was our man.

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[John Myatt] And I knew then, just then knew, foof, you know that part of my life, those months where I've been, you know, living in cloud. Cuckoo land, really. It really was cuckoo land. And this was reality coming to bite me up the back side with a vengeance.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] He was very, very reasonable, and obviously a bit shocked.

[John Myatt] It was horrible. I hated it. Um, but you could tell from the questions that they were asking, that they knew -- they knew more about me than I did. And they -- well, perhaps that's not true. They knew more about John Drewe than I did. Obviously.

[Narrator] The evidence was piling up.

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But the real gift came from Myatt's own hand.

[John Myatt] They were interviewing me in the interview room at Stafford Police Station. And somebody came in with this briefcase, and put this letter on the table, and said, "You know, what's this, then?" And it was one of those letters I'd written to John Drewe about three years previously when I was just getting ready to part company with him, really. And it said, "Dear John. I don't like what we're doing. You can carry on doing it if you want to, but for me, that's the end of it.

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No hard feelings. I'm not going to say anything. Yours sincerely, John Myatt." The letter was really a gift to the police,

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because it was just saying, "I'm guilty."

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] It was a very important letter. In fact, it gave us the state, the psychological state, of John Myatt. And it just showed he had been suckered into this. It made us, as police officers, realize who was doing what behind the forgery. So it was quite helpful.

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And also, in John Myatt's house, we found a whole library of art books, all of which, when you look through them,

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they had the pages turned over on

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the type of painting that John Drewe wanted him to do.

[John Myatt] But, I mean, looking back on it, there were so many slip-shod things that the police were able to pick up on. There was me using. I mean for goodness sake, using emulsion paint. You know it's just so stupid, isn't it? I mean, it is like, stupid. But there's that. There's John's kind of, you know, hundreds of little silly things he was doing in the provenances. And using the wrong typewriter.

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I think he signed a work in biro, two years before biro had been invented, you know.

Birosign provides a signature verification service for frequent signers. Our technology dynamically captures a digital copy of the signature, this handwritten gesture is unique to the signer, cannot be stolen, forged, or forgotten. The visual difference between a legit and a forged signature can be immaterial to the untrained eye. Birosign’s proprietary algorithm analyzes the dynamic character traits of the signature and authenticates the signer. -- Birosign, by birosign.com


Something like that. It's amazing that it was as successful as it was. It was kind of an amateur-hour kind of criminal operation. But it was just successful for a long time. I don't believe it. I don't believe it now. I think it was one of the daftest things that ever happened.

[Narrator] With so much evidence already gathered, John Myatt decided to cooperate with the police.

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[John Myatt] I said, "right," you know, "hands up."

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Pffff. It was just a better thing to do. I felt better with it, and in, you know, in a way, you were helping to undo some of the harm, you know, that had been done.

[Narrator] The game was up. With Myatt's honesty, the case strengthened further. After passing off over 200 fake paintings, and repeated corruption of the archives at the Tate, and the V&A [Victoria and Albert] in London, England, the police finally arrested John Drewe.

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[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] We found him to be very charming, affable, intelligent, highly intelligent man, with a very high IQ, a very, very good memory, and we found difficulty in believing virtually anything he said.

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We found a number of forged provenances. And he denied the whole lot. Well, he said they were genuine. And he went through court saying the whole lot were genuine.

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And in fact, he said the whole lot, were not only were they genuine despite the forensic evidence, despite the evidence of all the witnesses, not only that, he said it was an MI5 plot, which is real boy's own stuff. Absolute nonsense.

[Narrator] With Drewe and Myatt charged, the courtroom beckoned. But Drewe didn't seem ready for his day in the dock.

[John Myatt] We went through the whole palaver, going to Magistrates' court. And John would come into Magistrates' court. And as soon as he got there, he would pretend to have a heart attack.

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And then they'd have to adjourn the case. And you know, six months later we'd be back in Magistrates' court, and he'd have another heart attack in the foyer. You know, "haaah haaah haaah haaah." And off he'd go.

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So he took three Magistrates' court hearings before the Magistrate said, "Look, if he has to come in in a stretcher, get him in!"

[Narrator] So after several false starts, Myatt and Drewe headed to the Crown Court.

[John Myatt] And eventually got to Southwark Crown Court, and I knew what I was going to do. I was going to plead guilty. And that was that. And it was the best thing to do. I was guilty. So I couldn't see much point in trying to, you know, get my way out of it.

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[Narrator] Despite Myatt's guilty plea, Drewe pleaded, "not guilty." And two days into the trial, John Drewe sacked his legal representation, and opted to defend himself in court, with no legal counsel.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] I think the fact that Drewe elected to represent himself does tell us a lot about his psychology. Because it seems to me like a classic instance of the sociopathic con man who thinks that he is cleverer than everybody else. Who thinks that he's better than everybody else. Who thinks he doesn't need to bother with all the sort of apparatus of the state.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:24 am

Part 6 of 6

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He doesn't need a solicitor, or a court-appointed lawyer, or anything like that. That he can do a better job than any of them. It's a classic example of how deluded he was, I suppose.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] He defended himself very ably. And as I say, he had a, he has a very, very good mind. A very retentive memory. But in court he gave his qualifications as being a professor. Well, we tried very, very hard to find out exactly where he had got his qualifications from.

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The last thing we were told, it was in Germany somewhere. And so I don't know how much of it is true, how much of it is not true.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] The fact that he represented himself in court shows, again, a complete arrogance and disdain for authority. He didn't feel that anybody else was capable of representing him.

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[Narrator] In a brazen show of arrogance, John Drewe cross-examined representatives of the art world that he himself had attempted to con.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] I was asked to be a witness in court. And as Mr. Drewe esteemed that he didn't need a lawyer, he did the questioning. And it was quite funny.

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At one point, he was asking me a certain question about a certain work, and he was mixing up his works. And I had to correct him on that.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] Part of the reason that he was able to pull off the scam, or even attempt it in the first place, is because he thought he was cleverer than everybody else. But of course, that in itself, was the seed of his downfall, if you like. Because he's always cleverer than everyone else. He stopped being careful enough, and allowed himself to get tripped up.

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[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] I was a witness at his trial, which was rather surreal. Since Drewe didn't have a lawyer, he was defending himself, and being cross-questioned by the man who I had put there, or was one of the people who was put there. It was quite a strange experience. He did ask me some questions about -- I think he was trying to show that I wasn't a very good expert, and I didn't know what I was doing. But when I got down from the witness box I heard the Crown Prosecution lawyer say, "Oh well, Drewe didn't get anywhere with that witness then."

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[Narrator] After a four million pound court case lasting almost six months, the jury was adjourned to decide the verdict on the case dubbed, "The Greatest Art Fraud of the 20th Century." For eight years John Myatt and John Drewe duped the art world out of an extortionate amount of money, selling fake paintings as rediscovered classics. In 1998, the law had finally caught up with them. And the media described their scam as, "The Biggest Art Fraud of the Century."

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] To my knowledge, it was by far the largest art fraud of the 20th century, in ambition, and scope, and in expertise. Not just covering the amount of artists, but the whole way it was perpetrated.

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[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] So yesterday produced a scam which was taken to a further degree than the other fakers. In other words, giving the Tate Gallery a lot of money, becoming a patron, becoming a darling of the archives, the Tate, going in there and nicking stuff, nicking stuff out of the Victoria & Albert Museum, creating fakes -- of course he did a brilliant, elaborate scam.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] This con was very unique, insofar as that the forgeries themselves were well done. The actual painting was well done. The backup system for everything on the provenancing was brilliant. And the infiltration into the Archives was very, very professional. John Drewe has got a huge amount of -- for want of another word -- front.

[Narrator] After almost six months in court, the verdict was imminent for the con artists who had fooled the art world.

[John Myatt] Well, I was strolling around in Southwark Crown Court, and people were sort of outside taking bets on how long, you know, I was going to get. And someone said, "Well, you'll get six years. This is too big. You'll get seven years for this."

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And I thought, "God, what am I gonna do with my children? What a fool I've been. And, you know, you're beating yourself up, and all that. Anyway, I got a year.

[Narrator] Forger-turned-prosecution-witness Myatt had done himself a favor, and received 12 months for his role in the scam. Mastermind John Drewe, however, was sentenced to six years in prison.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] In terms of finance, we've never fully recovered the amount of money that John Drewe must have made out of this. I don't know whether there are other artists involved. I don't know, um, from John Myatt's side of things, 200 paintings, most of them at the lower end. The maths of it are up for conjecture. John Myatt himself -- we do know how much money he made. And it wasn't, uh, at the end of the day, all that much.

[John Myatt, Forger] As far as making money was concerned, the amount of money I made, I made early on. As the thing progressed, I made less and less money out of it. Um, if I'd stayed in teaching over the six-year period, I think I was getting around about 12,000 pounds a year as a teacher at that point. 12 and a half maybe. I would have made roughly the same amount of money as a supply teacher as I did as a criminal. But he made one and a half million pounds! So yeah.

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[Narrator] The money John Drewe made from the scam remains a mystery. The press speculated that John Drewe has pocketed between one and two million pounds. John Drewe has secured a position as one of Britain's most audacious and notorious con men. He served two years of his six-year sentence, and has yet to reoffend. John Myatt served two months of his sentence, and is now back to painting fakes.

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Only these days, John Myatt fakes are openly hanging in galleries up and down the UK.

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Having gone straight, Myatt is now selling his paintings legitimately,

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in his own exhibitions.

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[John Myatt, Forger] The main difference between the paintings here, and the ones I did for John Drewe, is what's on the back of them.

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And that is my name,

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and "Genuine Fakes."

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It feels good to have my signature on these paintings. It feels honorable, honest. And the paintings are exactly what they say they are.

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[Narrator] And now, legitimate John Myatt, has found customers in the unlikeliest of places.

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[John Myatt] My first ever customer, really, was the man who arrested me. And then the barristers who ran the case, also, became customers. And about six months ago, the foreman of the jury turned up. And he said he'd like a painting as well.

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That's very nice. I like that. I'm so pleased that I've left all that horrible criminal stuff behind. And I'm lucky enough to have had a second chance. That's what it comes down to. And if you do get a second chance, then the best thing is not to screw up again.

[Narrator] The investigation may now be closed. But the repercussions of this art con can still be felt today.

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[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] The problem with this entire case is that it puts in question a number of archives.

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[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] But the problem is that now, uh, archives have been infiltrated and polluted.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] It seems to me that John Drewe has most of the traits of the classic con man. He seems like an absolutely archetypal classic con man. Because he's obviously quite a, sort of, smooth operator. He's obviously very convincing. He's obviously quite happy to move in high society, for many years, without fear of being detected. He kept pulling this scam, which is an audacious scam, without any fear of being detected. And he's obviously adaptable and resourceful. You know, he's clever when he needs to be.

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He can even do some hard work when he needs to do it. So this guy obviously is, really, a very good con man.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] John Drewe is a very intelligent man. As far as we can see, he's dangerous because he lives in a dreamland. And therefore, it's very hard to discipline people like that. People who know they've done wrong might, or might not, do it in the future. Somebody who lives in la la land, we have a problem with. But he's a very intelligent man.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] We recovered 73 out of 200 of John Myatt. I don't know how many others, if there were any, that John Drewe did. I have no idea at all.

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[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] They can be anywhere. They can be in Japan, the United States, in Europe. Just anywhere.

[Narrator] No one knows which walls the unrecovered fakes by these astounding con artists hang on today, completely undetected. Who knows? Maybe even yours.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:26 am

Fantasy prone personality
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/13/22

[Narrator] For eight years, John Myatt and John Drewe colluded to achieve what has been dubbed "The Greatest Art Fraud of the 20th Century." The duo had no idea that suspicions were being roused within the art world. But forger John Myatt was becoming less and less comfortable with his partner-in-crime, John Drewe, and their joint deception.

[John Myatt, Forger] I was certain that it was going to end in, you know, tears. It was just a matter of, you know, when.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] As the con went on, the web of lies was obviously very complicated. But John Drewe had to sort of really fantasize, and put himself in the reality of it. And to him it was real. These paintings were genuine paintings.

[John Myatt, Forger] I remember, on one occasion, in an Italian restaurant, he was going on about a painting. And I said, "Come on, John. Just shut up for a minute. I painted these paintings. They're fakes." "Aaaahhh". And off he goes. He said, "No, no, no, no. You're wrong. These are not fake. I believe these are original paintings." And that was what he did! I guess that's the secret of being a success in that, you know, conning department. It's part of you has to sell to yourself, you know, across the sort of left side to the right side of the brain, or something. You have to persuade yourself that these are authentic paintings. And then you can be credible.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] The way that Drewe talked about, um, how "these weren't fakes -- they were real artworks," is maybe indicative that he was an example of what psychologists call, "fantasy prone personality." Now "fantasy prone personality" is someone who has trouble differentiating between fact and fantasy. And that he literally was not very good at telling the difference between his lies and the truth, and therefore, came to believe that his lies were the truth. Which of course would have made him a much more effective con man....


[Narrator] The game was up. With Myatt's honesty, the case strengthened further. After passing off over 200 fake paintings, and repeated corruption of the archives at the Tate, and the V&A [Victoria and Albert] in London, England, the police finally arrested John Drewe.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] We found him to be very charming, affable, intelligent, highly intelligent man, with a very high IQ, a very, very good memory, and we found difficulty in believing virtually anything he said. We found a number of forged provenances. And he denied the whole lot. Well, he said they were genuine. And he went through court saying the whole lot were genuine. And in fact, he said the whole lot, were not only were they genuine despite the forensic evidence, despite the evidence of all the witnesses, not only that, he said it was an MI5 plot, which is real boy's own stuff. Absolute nonsense.

[Narrator] With Drewe and Myatt charged, the courtroom beckoned. But Drewe didn't seem ready for his day in the dock.

[John Myatt] We went through the whole palaver, going to Magistrates' court. And John would come into Magistrates' court. And as soon as he got there, he would pretend to have a heart attack. And then they'd have to adjourn the case. And you know, six months later we'd be back in Magistrates' court, and he'd have another heart attack in the foyer. You know, "haaah haaah haaah haaah." And off he'd go. So he took three Magistrates' court hearings before the Magistrate said, "Look, if he has to come in in a stretcher, get him in!"

[Narrator] So after several false starts, Myatt and Drewe headed to the Crown Court.

[John Myatt] And eventually got to Southwark Crown Court. And I knew what I was going to do. I was going to plead guilty. And that was that. And it was the best thing to do. I was guilty. So I couldn't see much point in trying to, you know, get my way out of it.

[Narrator] Despite Myatt's guilty plea, Drewe pleaded, "not guilty." And two days into the trial, John Drewe sacked his legal representation, and opted to defend himself in court, with no legal counsel.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] I think the fact that Drewe elected to represent himself does tell us a lot about his psychology. Because it seems to me like a classic instance of the sociopathic con man who thinks that he is cleverer than everybody else. Who thinks that he's better than everybody else. Who thinks he doesn't need to bother with all the sort of apparatus of the state. He doesn't need a solicitor, or a court-appointed lawyer, or anything like that. That he can do a better job than any of them. It's a classic example of how deluded he was, I suppose.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] He defended himself very ably. And as I say, he had a, he has a very, very good mind. A very retentive memory. But in court he gave his qualifications as being a professor. Well, we tried very, very hard to find out exactly where he had got his qualifications from. The last thing we were told, it was in Germany somewhere. And so I don't know how much of it is true, how much of it is not true.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] The fact that he represented himself in court shows, again, a complete arrogance and disdain for authority. He didn't feel that anybody else was capable of representing him.

[Narrator] In a brazen show of arrogance, John Drewe cross-examined representatives of the art world that he himself had attempted to con.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] I was asked to be a witness in court. And as Mr. Drewe esteemed that he didn't need a lawyer, he did the questioning. And it was quite funny. At one point, he was asking me a certain question about a certain work, and he was mixing up his works. And I had to correct him on that.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] Part of the reason that he was able to pull off the scam, or even attempt it in the first place, is because he thought he was cleverer than everybody else. But of course, that in itself, was the seed of his downfall, if you like. Because he's always cleverer than everyone else. He stopped being careful enough, and allowed himself to get tripped up.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] I was a witness at his trial, which was rather surreal. Since Drewe didn't have a lawyer, he was defending himself, and being cross-questioned by the man who I had put there, or was one of the people who was put there. It was quite a strange experience. He did ask me some questions about -- I think he was trying to show that I wasn't a very good expert, and I didn't know what I was doing. But when I got down from the witness box I heard the Crown Prosecution lawyer say, "Oh well, Drewe didn't get anywhere with that witness then."...

[Narrator] Forger-turned-prosecution-witness Myatt had done himself a favor, and received 12 months for his role in the scam. Mastermind John Drewe, however, was sentenced to six years in prison....

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] It seems to me that John Drewe has most of the traits of the classic con man. He seems like an absolutely archetypal classic con man. Because he's obviously quite a, sort of, smooth operator. He's obviously very convincing. He's obviously quite happy to move in high society, for many years, without fear of being detected. He kept pulling this scam, which is an audacious scam, without any fear of being detected. And he's obviously adaptable and resourceful. You know, he's clever when he needs to be. He can even do some hard work when he needs to do it. So this guy obviously is, really, a very good con man.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] John Drewe is a very intelligent man. As far as we can see, he's dangerous because he lives in a dreamland. And therefore, it's very hard to discipline people like that. People who know they've done wrong might, or might not, do it in the future. Somebody who lives in la la land, we have a problem with. But he's a very intelligent man.


-- Inside Criminal Minds ... Con Men, [The Cunning Genius Who Fooled The Art World: John Myatt], Narration by Anthony Wilson

A far more promising approach to the problem, indeed a short cut, seemed to be heralded in a letter to Jones from Lieutenant Francis Wilford, a surveyor and an enthusiastic student of all things oriental, who was based at Benares. Jones had been sent copies of inscriptions found at Ellora and written in Ashoka Brahmi, the still undeciphered pin-men. He had probably sent them to Wilford because Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, was the most likely place to find a Brahmin who might be able to read them. In 1793 Wilford announced that he had found just such a man:
I have the honour to return to you the facsimile of several inscriptions with an explanation of them. I despaired at first of ever being able to decipher them... However, after many fruitless attempts on our part, we were so fortunate as to find at last an ancient sage, who gave us the key, and produced a book in Sanskrit, containing a great many ancient alphabets formerly in use in different parts of India. This was really a fortunate discovery, which hereafter may be of great service to us.

According to the ancient sage, most of Wilford's inscriptions related to the wanderings of the five heroic Pandava brothers from the Mahabharata. At the unspecified time in question they were under an obligation not to converse with the rest of mankind; so their friends devised a method of communicating with them by "writing short and obscure sentences on rocks and stones in the wilderness and in characters previously agreed upon betwixt them." The sage happened to have the key to these characters in his code book; obligingly he transcribed them into Devanagari Sanskrit and then translated them.

To be fair to Wilford, he was a bit suspicious about this ingenious explanation of how the inscriptions got there. But he had no doubts that the deciphering and translation were genuine. "Our having been able to decipher them is a great point in my opinion, as it may hereafter lead to further discoveries, that may ultimately crown our labours with success." Above all, he had now located the code book, "a most fortunate circumstance."

Fake provenance is used to help authenticate a fake work of art. -- Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable, International Journal of Cultural Property, by Cambridge University Press

Poor Wilford was the laughing stock of the Benares Brahmins for a whole decade. They had already fobbed him off with Sanskrit texts, later proved spurious, on the source of the Nile and the origin of Mecca. After the code book there was a geographical treatise on The Sacred Isles of the West, which included early Hindu reference to the British Isles. The Brahmins, to whom Sanskrit had so long remained a sacred prerogative, were getting their own back. One wonders how much Wilford paid his "ancient sage."

Jones was already a little suspicious of Wilford's sources, but on the code book, which was as much a fabrication as the translations supposedly based on it, he reserved judgment until he might see it. He never did. In fact it was never heard of again. But in spite of these disappointments Jones continued to believe that in time this oldest script would be deciphered. He had been sent a copy of the writings on the Delhi pillar and told a correspondent that they "drive me to despair; you are right, I doubt not, in thinking them foreign; I believe them to be Ethiopian and to have been imported a thousand years before Christ." It was not one of his more inspired guesses and at the time of his death the mystery of the inscriptions and of the monoliths was as dark as ever.

-- India Discovered, by John Keay

Fantasy prone personality (FPP) is a disposition or personality trait in which a person experiences a lifelong, extensive, and deep involvement in fantasy.[1] This disposition is an attempt, at least in part, to better describe "overactive imagination" or "living in a dream world".[2] An individual with this trait (termed a fantasizer) may have difficulty differentiating between fantasy and reality and may experience hallucinations, as well as self-suggested psychosomatic symptoms. Closely related psychological constructs include daydreaming, absorption and eidetic memory.

History

American psychologists Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber first identified FPP in 1981, said to apply to about 4% of the population.[3] Besides identifying this trait, Wilson and Barber reported a number of childhood antecedents that likely laid the foundation for fantasy proneness in later life, such as, "a parent, grandparent, teacher, or friend who encouraged the reading of fairy tales, reinforced the child's ... fantasies, and treated the child's dolls and stuffed animals in ways that encouraged the child to believe that they were alive." They suggested that this trait was almost synonymous with those who responded dramatically to hypnotic induction, that is, "high hypnotizables".[1]

The first systematic studies were conducted in the 1980s by psychologists Judith Rhue and Steven Jay Lynn.[1] Later research in the 1990s by Deirdre Barrett at Harvard confirmed most of these characteristics of fantasy prone people, but she also identified another set of highly hypnotizable subjects who had had traumatic childhoods and who identified fantasy time mainly by "spacing out".[4]

Characteristic features

Fantasy prone persons are reported to spend up to half (or more) of their time awake fantasizing or daydreaming. People with Type 1 FPP will often confuse or mix their fantasies with their real memories. They also report out-of-body experiences, and other similar experiences that are interpreted by the some fantasizers as psychic (parapsychological) or mystical.[3] However, those with Type 2 have perfect ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, much like the people with schizoid personality disorder.

A paracosm is an extremely detailed and structured fantasy world often created by extreme or compulsive fantasizers.[5]

Wilson and Barber listed numerous characteristics in their pioneer study, which have been clarified and amplified in later studies.[6][7] These characteristics include some or many of the following experiences:

• excellent hypnotic subject (most but not all fantasizers)
• having imaginary friends in childhood
• fantasizing often as child
• having an actual fantasy identity
• experiencing imagined sensations as real
• having vivid sensory perceptions
• receiving sexual satisfaction without physical stimulation

Fantasy proneness is measured by the "inventory of childhood memories and imaginings" (ICMI)[8] and the "creative experiences questionnaire (CEQ).[9]

Developmental pathways

Fantasizers have had a large exposure to fantasy during early childhood.[1][6] This over-exposure to childhood fantasy has at least three important causes:

• Parents or caregivers who indulged in their child's imaginative mental or play environment during childhood.

People with fantasy prone personalities are more likely to have had parents, or close family members that joined the child in believing toys are living creatures. They may also have encouraged the child who believed they had imaginary companions, read fairytales all through childhood and re-enacted the things they had read. People who, at a young age, were involved in creative fantasy activities like piano, ballet, and drawing are more likely to obtain a fantasy prone personality.[citation needed] Acting is also a way for children to identify as different people and characters which can make the child prone to fantasy-like dreams as they grow up.[citation needed] This can cause the person to grow up thinking they have experienced certain things and they can visualize a certain occurrence from the training they obtained while being involved in plays.[citation needed]

People have reported that they believed their dolls and stuffed animals were living creatures and that their parents encouraged them to indulge in their fantasies and daydreams.[9] For example, one subject in Barrett's study said her parents' standard response to her requests for expensive toys was, "You could take this (household object) and with a little imagination, it would look just like (an expensive gift)."[10]

• Exposure to abuse, physical or sexual, such that fantasizing provides a coping or escape mechanism.
• Exposure to severe loneliness and isolation, such that fantasizing provides a coping or escape mechanism from the boredom.

Regarding psychoanalytic interpretations, Sigmund Freud stated that "unsatisfied wishes are the driving power behind fantasies, every separate fantasy contains the fulfillment of a wish, and improves an unsatisfactory reality." This shows childhood abuse and loneliness can result in people creating a fantasy world of happiness in order to fill the void.[1]

Related constructs

Openness to experience is one of the five domains that are used to describe human personality in the Five Factor Model.[11] Openness involves six facets, or dimensions, including active imagination (fantasy), aesthetic sensitivity, attentiveness to inner feelings, preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. Thus, fantasy prone personality correlates with the fantasy facet of the broader personality trait Openness to Experience.

Absorption is a disposition or personality trait in which a person becomes absorbed in his or her mental imagery, particularly fantasy.[12] The original research on absorption was by American psychologist Auke Tellegen.[13] Roche reports that fantasy proneness and absorption are highly correlated.[12] Fantasizers become absorbed within their vivid and realistic mental imagery.

Dissociation is a psychological process involving alterations in personal identity or sense of self. These alterations can include: a sense that one's self or the world is unreal (derealization and depersonalization); a loss of memory (amnesia); forgetting one's identity or assuming a new self (fugue); and fragmentation of identity or self into separate streams of consciousness (dissociative identity disorder, formerly termed multiple personality disorder). Dissociation is measured most often by the Dissociative Experiences Scale. Several studies have reported that dissociation and fantasy proneness are highly correlated. This suggests the possibility that the dissociated selves are merely fantasies, for example, being a coping response to trauma. However, a lengthy review of the evidence concludes that there is strong empirical support for the hypothesis that dissociation is caused primarily and directly by exposure to trauma, and that fantasy is of secondary importance.[14]

Health implications

False pregnancy (pseudocyesis) - A high number of female fantasizers – 60% of the women asked in the Wilson-Barber study – reported that they have had a false pregnancy (pseudocyesis) at least once. They believed that they were pregnant, and they had many of the symptoms. In addition to amenorrhea (stoppage of menstruation), they typically experienced at least four of the following: breast changes, abdominal enlargement, morning sickness, cravings, and "fetal" movements. Two of the subjects went for abortions, following which they were told that no fetus had been found. All of the other false pregnancies terminated quickly when negative results were received from pregnancy tests.[3]

Maladaptive daydreaming is a proposed psychological disorder, a fantasy activity that replaces human interaction and interferes with work, relationships and general activities. Those with this pathology daydream or fantasize excessively, assuming roles and characters in scenarios created to their liking. People with excessive daydreaming are aware that the scenarios and characters of their fantasies are not real and have the ability to determine what is real, elements that differentiate them from those with schizophrenia.[15][16]

See also

• Hyperphantasia
• Suggestibility
• "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

References

1. Lynn, Steven J.; Rhue, Judith W. (1988). "Fantasy proneness: Hypnosis, developmental antecedents, and psychopathology". American Psychologist. 43 (1): 35–44. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.43.1.35. PMID 3279876.
2. Glausiusz, Josie (2011). "Living in a dream world". Scientific American Mind. 20 (1): 24–31. doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind0311-24.
3. Wilson, S. C. & Barber, T. X. (1983). "The fantasy-prone personality: Implications for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena." In, A. A. Sheikh (editor), Imagery: Current theory, research and application (pp. 340–390). New York: Wiley. ISBN 0471 092258. Republished (edited): Psi Research 1(3), 94 – 116. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1983-22322-001.
4. Barrett, D. L. The hypnotic dream: Its content in comparison to nocturnal dreams and waking fantasy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1979, Vol. 88, p. 584 591; Barrett, D. L. Fantasizers and dissociaters: Two types of high hypnotizables, two imagery styles. In R. G. Kunzendorf, N. Spanos, & B. Wallace (Eds.) Hypnosis and Imagination, NY: Baywood, 1996 (ISBN 0895031396); Barrett, D. L. Dissociaters, fantasizers, and their relation to hypnotizability. In Barrett, D. L. (Ed.) Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy (2 vols): Vol. 1: History, theory and general research, Vol. 2: Psychotherapy research and applications, NY: Praeger/Greenwood, 2010.
5. Mackeith, S. & Silvey, R. (1988). The paracosm: a special form of fantasy. In, Morrison, D.C. (Ed.), Organizing early experience: Imagination and cognition in childhood (pages 173 – 197). New York: Baywood. ISBN 0895030519.
6. Rhue, Judith W.; Jay Lynn, Steven (1987). "Fantasy proneness: Developmental antecedents". Journal of Personality. 55: 121–137. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1987.tb00431.x.
7. Novella, Steven (2007-04-03). "The Fantasy prone personality". NeuroLogica Blog. Self-published. Retrieved 2011-11-13.
8. Myers, S. A. (1983). "The Wilson-Barber Inventory of Childhood Memories and Imaginings: Children's form [etc]". Journal of Mental Imagery. 7: 83–94.
9. Merckelbach, H.; et al. (2001). "The Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ): a brief self-report measure of fantasy proneness". Personality and Individual Differences. 31 (6): 987–995. doi:10.1016/s0191-8869(00)00201-4. Archived from the original on 2021-01-27. Retrieved 2019-12-05.
10. Barrett, D. L. (2010). Dissociaters, fantasizers, and their relation to hypnotizability. Chapter 2, in Barrett, D. L. (Ed.), Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy (2 vols) New York: Praeger/Greenwood, p. 62 – 63.
11. McCrae, R. R. (1994). "Openness to experience: Expanding the boundaries of Factor-V". European Journal of Personality. 8 (4): 251–272. doi:10.1002/per.2410080404. S2CID 144576220. Archived from the original on 2021-01-27. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
12. Roche, Suzanne M.; McConkey, Kevin M. (1990). "Absorption: Nature, assessment, and correlates". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 59 (1): 91–101. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.59.1.91. ISSN 0022-3514.
13. Tellegen, Auke; Atkinson, Gilbert (1974). "Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences ("absorption"), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility". Journal of Abnormal Psychology. 83 (3): 268–277. doi:10.1037/h0036681. ISSN 0021-843X. PMID 4844914.
14. Dalenberg, Constance J.; Brand, Bethany L.; Gleaves, David H.; et al. (2012). "Evaluation of the evidence for the trauma and fantasy models of dissociation" (PDF). Psychological Bulletin. 138 (3): 550–588. doi:10.1037/a0027447. ISSN 1939-1455. PMID 22409505. Archived from the original on 2021-01-27. Retrieved 2019-02-13.
15. Somer, Eli (2002). "Maladaptive daydreaming: A qualitative inquiry" (PDF). Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy. 32 (2/3): 197–211. doi:10.1023/A:1020597026919. S2CID 27013772. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2018-11-27. Retrieved 2018-11-03.
16. Bigelsen, Jayne; Schupak, Cynthia (2011). "Compulsive fantasy: Proposed evidence of an under-reported syndrome through a systematic study of 90 self-identified non-normative fantasizers". Consciousness and Cognition. 20 (4): 1634–1648. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.08.013. ISSN 1053-8100. PMID 21959201. S2CID 206954778.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 5:29 am

Fernand Leger
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/6/22

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[Michel Braudeau, Journalist/Author, Paris] [Speaking French] The story of de Hory is a story of someone who endlessly hid.

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He died in 1976, so you can still meet people who knew him.

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I never met him, but I hope you've met others who did. When Elmyr was young, he faced two problems.

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He lived the life of an artist, and he was homosexual. So, he went to Munich, where he had more freedom away from his family.

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That didn't go well for long,

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so he came to Paris, because that was where it was all happening.

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It was the epoch there, in 1926, when it was all happening.

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He worked with Fernand Leger at the Grand Chaumiere.

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Even Fernand Leger created fakes.

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And if he could create a small drawing by copying somebody else -- there it is!

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He would play between fellow

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by making a fake amongst colleagues. During the era of Courbet, there were many fakes.

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Jean-Baptise de CamilleCorot had a factory, because he couldn't keep up with the demand. So he had people serving as his agent, making Corots.

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All the painters from the beginning of the 20th century -- all of them copied each other. Even Van Goghs.

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There are even two versions of the Irises. I think Elmyr was someone who

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benefited greatly from this time,

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when there were less checks and balances than today.

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And through the good graces of this, he prospered.

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[Marc Restellini, Founder/President, Pinacotheque Museum, Paris] [Speaking French] Also with the aid of his accomplice,

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Fernand Legros, who was more ill-intentioned than Elmyr. He was happy to stay in his corner without suffering the consequences of his commercial actions in the market of all these artists, and which had monstrous consequence. I think that since de Hory had no money, he would say, "If Fernand Leger did it, why not me?"

-- The Artist Who Got Rich Forging Picasso & Matisse: Real Fake: Elmyr de Hory, directed by Clifford Irving


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Fernand Léger, c. 1916
Born: February 4, 1881, Argentan, Orne, France
Died: August 17, 1955 (aged 74), Gif-sur-Yvette, France
Known for: Painting, printmaking and filmmaking
Movement: Cubism; Modernism

Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (French: [leʒe]; February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of cubism (known as "tubism") which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art.

Biography

Léger was born in Argentan, Orne, Lower Normandy, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897 to 1899, before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles, Yvelines, in 1902–1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts after his application to the École des Beaux-Arts was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while also studying at the Académie Julian.[1][2] He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mère (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907.[3]

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Fernand Léger, Nudes in the forest (Nus dans la forêt), 1910, oil on canvas, 120 × 170 cm, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

1909–1914

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Les Fumeurs (The Smokers), 1911–12, oil on canvas, 129.2 × 96.5 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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La Femme en Bleu (Woman in Blue), 1912, oil on canvas, 193 × 129.9 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel. Exhibited at the 1912 Salon d'Automne, Paris

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Nude Model in the Studio (Le modèle nu dans l'atelier), 1912–13, oil on burlap, 128.6 × 95.9 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

In 1909 he moved to Montparnasse and met Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Marc Chagall, Joseph Csaky and Robert Delaunay.

In 1910 he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in the same room (salle VIII) as Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. In his major painting of this period, Nudes in the Forest, Léger displays a personal form of Cubism that his critics termed "Tubism" for its emphasis on cylindrical forms.[4]

In 1911 the hanging committee of the Salon des Indépendants placed together the painters identified as 'Cubists'. Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay and Léger were responsible for revealing Cubism to the general public for the first time as an organized group.

The following year he again exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and Indépendants with the Cubists, and joined with several artists, including Le Fauconnier, Metzinger, Gleizes, Francis Picabia and the Duchamp brothers, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Marcel Duchamp to form the Puteaux Group—also called the Section d'Or (The Golden Section).

Léger's paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. Their tubular, conical, and cubed forms are laconically rendered in rough patches of primary colors plus green, black and white, as seen in the series of paintings with the title Contrasting Forms. Léger made no use of the collage technique pioneered by Braque and Picasso.[5]

1914–1920

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Fernand Léger, 1916, Soldier with a pipe (Le Soldat à la Pipe), oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dùsseldorf

Léger's experiences in World War I had a significant effect on his work. Mobilized in August 1914 for service in the French Army, he spent two years at the front in Argonne.[4] He produced many sketches of artillery pieces, airplanes, and fellow soldiers while in the trenches, and painted Soldier with a Pipe (1916) while on furlough. In September 1916 he almost died after a mustard gas attack by the German troops at Verdun. During a period of convalescence in Villepinte he painted The Card Players (1917), a canvas whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war. As he explained:

...I was stunned by the sight of the breech of a 75 millimeter in the sunlight. It was the magic of light on the white metal. That's all it took for me to forget the abstract art of 1912–1913. The crudeness, variety, humor, and downright perfection of certain men around me, their precise sense of utilitarian reality and its application in the midst of the life-and-death drama we were in ... made me want to paint in slang with all its color and mobility.[6]


This work marked the beginning of his "mechanical period", during which the figures and objects he painted were characterized by sleekly rendered tubular and machine-like forms. Starting in 1918, he also produced the first paintings in the Disk series, in which disks suggestive of traffic lights figure prominently.[7] In December 1919 he married Jeanne-Augustine Lohy, and in 1920 he met Le Corbusier, who would remain a lifelong friend.

1920s

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Still Life with a Beer Mug, 1921, oil on canvas, Tate, London

The "mechanical" works Léger painted in the 1920s, in their formal clarity as well as in their subject matter—the mother and child, the female nude, figures in an ordered landscape—are typical of the postwar "return to order" in the arts, and link him to the tradition of French figurative painting represented by Poussin and Corot.[8] In his paysages animés (animated landscapes) of 1921, figures and animals exist harmoniously in landscapes made up of streamlined forms. The frontal compositions, firm contours, and smoothly blended colors of these paintings frequently recall the works of Henri Rousseau, an artist Léger greatly admired and whom he had met in 1909.

They also share traits with the work of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant who together had founded Purism, a style intended as a rational, mathematically based corrective to the impulsiveness of cubism. Combining the classical with the modern, Léger's Nude on a Red Background (1927) depicts a monumental, expressionless woman, machinelike in form and color. His still life compositions from this period are dominated by stable, interlocking rectangular formations in vertical and horizontal orientation. The Siphon of 1924, a still life based on an advertisement in the popular press for the aperitif Campari, represents the high-water mark of the Purist aesthetic in Léger's work.[9] Its balanced composition and fluted shapes suggestive of classical columns are brought together with a quasi-cinematic close-up of a hand holding a bottle.

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La femme et l'enfant (Mother and Child), 1922, oil on canvas, 171.2 x 240.9 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel

As an enthusiast of the modern, Léger was greatly attracted to cinema, and for a time he considered giving up painting for filmmaking.[10] In 1923–24 he designed the set for the laboratory scene in Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine (The Inhuman One). In 1924, in collaboration with Dudley Murphy, George Antheil, and Man Ray, Léger produced and directed the iconic and Futurism-influenced film Ballet Mécanique (Mechanical Ballet). Neither abstract nor narrative, it is a series of images of a woman's lips and teeth, close-up shots of ordinary objects, and repeated images of human activities and machines in rhythmic movement.[11]

In collaboration with Amédée Ozenfant he established the Académie Moderne, a free school where he taught from 1924, with Alexandra Exter and Marie Laurencin. He produced the first of his "mural paintings", influenced by Le Corbusier's theories, in 1925. Intended to be incorporated into polychrome architecture, they are among his most abstract paintings, featuring flat areas of color that appear to advance or recede.[12]

1930s

Starting in 1927, the character of Léger's work gradually changed as organic and irregular forms assumed greater importance.[13] The figural style that emerged in the 1930s is fully displayed in the Two Sisters of 1935, and in several versions of Adam and Eve.[14] With characteristic humor, he portrayed Adam in a striped bathing suit, or sporting a tattoo.

In 1931, Léger made his first visit to the United States, where he traveled to New York City and Chicago.[15] In 1935, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition of his work. In 1938, Léger was commissioned to decorate Nelson Rockefeller's apartment.[16]

1940s

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Paintings by Fernand Léger, 1912, La Femme en Bleu, Woman in Blue, Kunstmuseum Basel; Jean Metzinger, 1912, Dancer in a café, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; and sculpture by Alexander Archipenko, 1912, La Vie Familiale, Family Life (destroyed). Published in Les Annales politiques et littéraires, n. 1529, 13 October 1912

During World War II Léger lived in the United States. He taught at Yale University, and found inspiration for a new series of paintings in the novel sight of industrial refuse in the landscape. The shock of juxtaposed natural forms and mechanical elements, the "tons of abandoned machines with flowers cropping up from within, and birds perching on top of them" exemplified what he called the "law of contrast".[17] His enthusiasm for such contrasts resulted in such works as The Tree in the Ladder of 1943–44, and Romantic Landscape of 1946. Reprising a composition of 1930, he painted Three Musicians (Museum of Modern Art, New York) in 1944. Reminiscent of Rousseau in its folk-like character, the painting exploits the law of contrasts in its juxtaposition of the three men and their instruments.[18]

During his American sojourn, Léger began making paintings in which freely arranged bands of color are juxtaposed with figures and objects outlined in black. Léger credited the neon lights of New York City as the source of this innovation: "I was struck by the neon advertisements flashing all over Broadway. You are there, you talk to someone, and all of a sudden he turns blue. Then the color fades—another one comes and turns him red or yellow."[19]

Upon his return to France in 1945, he joined the Communist Party.[20] During this period his work became less abstract, and he produced many monumental figure compositions depicting scenes of popular life featuring acrobats, builders, divers, and country outings. Art historian Charlotta Kotik has written that Léger's "determination to depict the common man, as well as to create for him, was a result of socialist theories widespread among the avant-garde both before and after World War II. However, Léger's social conscience was not that of a fierce Marxist, but of a passionate humanist".[21] His varied projects included book illustrations, murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, polychrome ceramic sculptures, and set and costume designs.

1950s

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Stained-glass window at the Central University of Venezuela, 1954

After the death of Leger's wife Jeanne-Augustine Lohy in 1950, Léger married Nadia Khodossevitch in 1952. In his final years he lectured in Bern, designed mosaics and stained-glass windows for the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela, and painted Country Outing, The Camper, and the series The Big Parade. In 1954 he began a project for a mosaic for the São Paulo Opera, which he would not live to finish. Fernand Léger died at his home in 1955 and is buried in Gif-sur-Yvette, Essonne.

Legacy

Léger wrote in 1945 that "the object in modern painting must become the main character and overthrow the subject. If, in turn, the human form becomes an object, it can considerably liberate possibilities for the modern artist." He elaborated on this idea in his 1949 essay, "How I Conceive the Human Figure", where he wrote that "abstract art came as a complete revelation, and then we were able to consider the human figure as a plastic value, not as a sentimental value. That is why the human figure has remained willfully inexpressive throughout the evolution of my work".[22] As the first painter to take as his idiom the imagery of the machine age, and to make the objects of consumer society the subjects of his paintings, Léger has been called a progenitor of Pop Art.[23]

He was active as a teacher for many years, first at the Académie Vassilieff in Paris, then in 1931 at the Sorbonne, and then developing his own Académie Fernand Léger, which was in Paris, then at the Yale School of Art and Architecture (1938–1939), Mills College Art Gallery in Oakland, California during 1940–1945, before he returned to France.[24] Among his many pupils were Nadir Afonso, Paul Georges, Charlotte Gilbertson, Hananiah Harari, Asger Jorn, Michael Loew, Beverly Pepper, Victor Reinganum, Marcel Mouly, René Margotton, Saloua Raouda Choucair and Charlotte Wankel, Peter Agostini, Lou Albert-Lasard, Tarsila do Amaral, Arie Aroch, Alma del Banco, Christian Berg, Louise Bourgeois, Marcelle Cahn, Otto Gustaf Carlsund, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Robert Colescott, Lars Englund, Tsuguharu Foujita, Sam Francis, Serge Gainsbourg, Hans Hartung, Florence Henri, William Klein, Maryan, George Lovett Kingsland Morris, Marlow Moss, Aurélie Nemours, Gerhard Neumann, Jules Olitski, Erik Olson, Richard Stankiewicz and Stasys Usinskas.[24]

In 1952, a pair of Léger murals was installed in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations headquarters in New York City.[25]

In 1960, the Fernand Léger Museum was opened in Biot, Alpes-Maritimes, France.

Léger bequeathed his residence (at 108 Avenue du General Leclerc, Gif sur Yvette, Paris) to the French Communist Party, which later hosted negotiations of the Paris Peace Accords between the United States, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Republic of Vietnam and the Republic of South Vietnam[26]

In May 2008, his painting Étude pour la femme en bleu (1912–13) sold for $39,241,000 (hammer price with buyer's premium) United States dollars.[27]

In August 2008, one of Léger's paintings owned by Wellesley College's Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Mother and Child, was reported missing. It is believed to have disappeared some time between April 9, 2007 and November 19, 2007. A $100,000 reward is being offered for information that leads to the safe return of the painting.[28]

Léger's work was featured in the exhibition "Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis" from October 14, 2013, through January 5, 2014, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[29]

Gallery

Image

• Le compotier (Table and Fruit), 1910–11, oil on canvas, 82.2 × 97.8 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912

Image

• Étude pour trois portraits (Study for Three Portraits), 1911, oil on canvas, 194.9 × 116.5 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum

Image

• Les Toits de Paris (Roofs in Paris, 1911, oil on canvas, private collection. Reproduced in Du "Cubisme", 1912

Image

• Composition (Study for Nude Model in the Studio), 1912, oil, gouache, and ink on paper, 63.8 × 48.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Image

• Paysage (Landscape), 1912–13, oil on canvas, 92 × 81 cm

Image

• Contrast of Forms (Contraste de formes), 1913. Published in Der Sturm, 5 September 1920

Image

• Nature morte (Still life), 1914

Image

• Paysage No. 1 (Le Village dans la forêt), 1914, oil on burlap, 74 x 93 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Image

• Le Fumeur (The Smoker), 1914, oil on canvas, 100.3 x 81.3 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Image

• Dans L'Usine, 1918, oil on canvas, 56 × 38 cm

Image

• The City (La ville), 1919, oil on canvas, 231.1 × 298.4 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Image

• The Railway Crossing, 1919, oil on canvas, 54.1 × 65.7 cm, Art Institute of Chicago

Image

• Grand parade with red background, 1958 (designed in 1953), mosaic, National Gallery of Victoria

References and sources

References


1. Néret 1993, p. 35.
2. Robert L. Herbert, From Millet to Léger: Essays in Social Art History, p. 115, Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN 0300097069
3. Néret 1993, pp. 35–38.
4. Néret 1993, p. 242.
5. Néret 1993, p. 102.
6. Néret 1993, p. 66.
7. Buck 1982, p. 141.
8. Cowling and Mundy 1990, pp. 136–138.
9. Eliel 2001, p. 37.
10. Néret 1993, p. 119.
11. Eliel 2001, p. 44.
12. Eliel 2001, p. 58.
13. Cowling and Mundy 1990, p 144.
14. Buck 1982, p. 23.
15. Néret 1993, p. 246.
16. Buck 1982, p. 48.
17. Néret 1993, pp. 210–217.
18. Buck 1982, pp. 53–54.
19. Buck 1982, p. 52.
20. Buck 1982, p. 143.
21. Buck 1982, p. 58.
22. Néret 1993, p. 98.
23. Buck 1982, p. 42.
24. Pupils Fernand Léger in the RKD
25. An 'element of inspiration and calm' at UN Headquarters – art in the life of the United Nations Retrieved October 13, 2010
26. Breakthrough in Paris Blocked in Saigon, October 8–23, 1972 Retrieved December 11, 2021
27. Étude Pour la Femme En Bleu, record price at public auction, Sotheby's New York, 7 May 2008
28. Geoff Edgers, A masterwork goes missing, The Boston Globe, August 27, 2008
29. Philadelphia Museum of Art
Sources
• Bartorelli, Guido (2011). Fernand Léger cubista 1909-1914. Padova, Italy: Cleup. ISBN 978-88-6129-656-5.
• Buck, Robert T. et al. (1982). Fernand Léger. New York: Abbeville Publishers. ISBN 0-89659-254-5.
• Cowling, Elizabeth; Mundy, Jennifer (1990). On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930. London: Tate Gallery. ISBN 1-85437-043-X.
• Eliel, Carol S. et al. (2001). L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925. New York: Harry Abrams, Inc. ISBN 0-8109-6727-8.
• Léger, Fernand (1973). Functions of Painting. New York: Viking Press. Translation by Alexandra Anderson.
• Léger, Fernand (2009). F. Léger. exhibition catalogue. Paris: Galerie Malingue. ISBN 2-9518323-4-6.
• Néret, Gilles (1993). F. Léger. New York: BDD Illustrated Books. ISBN 0-7924-5848-6.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Fernand Léger.

• Works by or about Fernand Léger at Internet Archive
• Artcyclopedia - Links to Léger's works
• Fernand Léger at the Museum of Modern Art
• Fernand Léger at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Saint-Etienne Métropole
• Artchive - Biography and images of Léger's works
• Ballet Mecanique - Watch Fernand Léger's Short Film
• Paintings by Fernand Léger (public domain in Canada)
• Fernand Léger, L'Esprit nouveau: revue internationale d'esthétique, 1920. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France
• Fernand Léger in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
• Fernand Léger at the Tate Liverpool
• Discussion of "Trois femmes sur fond rouge, 1927" in French
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Wed Nov 09, 2022 8:26 am

Part 1 of 2

Defining a 'Pseudo-Plato' Epigrammatist
by Davide Massimo

From Defining Authorship, Debating Authenticity: Problems of Authority from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance
Edited by Roberta Berardi, Martina Filosa, and Davide Massimo
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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1 Introduction

This paper will analyze the corpus of epigrams which were variously ascribed in ancient times to the philosopher Plato.1 Scholars nowadays tend not to believe in the authenticity of these texts, and so they are defined as pseudepigraphical and their author is generally labelled as ps.-Plato. Pseudepigraphical literature is a fascinating yet complex subject, in which convenient labels often hide a series of complicated dynamics of textual transmission and cultural history.2 Pseudepigraphical epigrams are no exception, and so it is with those ascribed to Plato. The ultimate aim of this paper is to analyze such dynamics, in order to sketch the origin and the history of this corpus of epigrams and thus to provide a satisfactory definition of the ps.-Plato label, with a specific focus on the erotic sub-group of epigrams.

The only comprehensive edition of all these epigrams is Epigrammata Graeca by D.L. [Denys Lionel] Page,
3 in which 31 epigrams variously ascribed to Plato are included. The edition was followed by Further Greek Epigrams by the same editor,4 which narrowed the selection to 24. [5] I will treat the subject with regard to all 31, since they all contribute to the overall picture of the corpus.6 The sources of the epigrams are different: the great majority of them (29 epigrams) are in the Greek Anthology, one is in Athenaeus (epigram IX) and another one (epigram XIV) in an anonymous Vita Aristophanis and Olympiodorus. Of the 29 epigrams contained in the Greek Anthology, nine are also present in Diogenes Laertius, three in Apuleius and others in later writers (for these additional sources, see below). Almost all of the epigrams fall into the erotic, sepulchral [relating to a tomb or interment], or ecphrastic [a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined] sub-categories (cf. the table at the end).

2 The Authenticity of the Epigrams

As mentioned above, pseudepigraphical literature is a complex matter which encompasses a wide variety of entities. Different labels and categories have been suggested, which do not (admittedly) cover all the existing cases of Greek and Roman literature: it might be useful to recall some of them.7 The greatest distinction is between 'intentional' pseudepigraphical and 'unintentional' pseudepigraphical works. The former category, which involves the actions of forgers, itself encompasses different cases, since forgers could ascribe a work to a third person, different from the actual author, or also to themselves; besides, this choice could be made for different reasons and with different intentions.8 The latter category ('unintentional') involves the occurrence of mistakes in the ascription, which can be of various origins (e.g. in the manuscripts, headings etc., or originated from authors with the same or similar names).9 The existence of pseudepigraphical works and the criteria for ascertaining the authenticity of literary works were already acknowledged in Antiquity, and in the same way one can distinguish cases where the doubts about authenticity go back to Antiquity (e.g. the most famous case of Varro's catalogue of Plautus' comedies), and cases in which the doubt only arose in modern times.10 The case of the epigrams ascribed to Plato is a good exemplification of the complexity of the pseudepigraphical problem: from the following pages, in fact, it will be clear that these epigrams fall under both macro-categories ('intentional' and 'unintentional') and exemplify their different sub-categories (i.e. different reasons for the ascription). At the same time, however, the epigrams demonstrate the inadequacy of the pseudepigraphical categories and constitute a peculiar case for several reasons. Firstly, the epigrams are poetic texts whereas Plato is known to us exclusively as an author of philosophical prose. Secondly, within the corpus of his philosophical works there is already a debate about authenticity for some pieces (notably the Letters). Lastly, this case is different even from the debates about the authenticity of epigrammatic texts (notably 'Simonides'11 and 'Theocritus'):12 in those cases, there seems to be at least a core of authentic epigrams.

This leads us to the thorny question of the authenticity of the epigrams ascribed to Plato, which involves different layers of complexity. The analysis which follows will show that the corpus is stratified, and the material has different origins: it is therefore more sensible to distinguish the material rather than proving or disproving the authenticity of all of the epigrams a priori. Let us briefly sketch the modern approach to the authenticity of the epigrams before moving on to the next step of the analysis.13

There were substantially no doubts about authenticity from ancient times all the way until the modern age, when scholars such as Hermann,14 Bergk,15 and Reitzenstein16 raised the first objections to the communis opinio [general opinion], denying the authenticity of some or all of the epigrams. Conversely, authoritative voices for authenticity appeared in the first half of the 20th century, namely those of Wilamowitz17 and Bowra.18 It is only with Ludwig19 that a strong case against the authenticity of a specific sub-group of the epigrams (the erotic ones) was built, which was then accepted and developed further by Page.20 Ludwig's main argument, which is still held to be valid, is that the style of the erotic sub-group is plainly that of Hellenistic erotic epigram: 'If the so-called Platonic erotic epigrams had really been composed by Plato, they would destroy the apparent logic of the literary development -- after the seventh and sixth centuries, decline in the fifth and the fourth, then c. 300, the revival with Asklepiades. This fact at the start necessarily makes us suspicious about the tradition ascribing these love epigrams to Plato'.21 Specific arguments pertaining to the erotic epigrams will be treated in the following pages. It is clear, then, that the main argument against the authenticity of this group is a chronological/stylistic criterion.22 A similar argument can be applied to the other sub-groups (sepulchral, ecphrastic), with the addition that it is even possible sometimes to suggest an ascription to other known authors, which again denies Platonic authorship (e.g. the case of Asclepiades or Plato the Younger, for which cf. below).

Having said that, one still has to consider the epigrams separately, with regard not only to their authenticity, but also to the reasons for their ascription to Plato and the ways in which they are ascribed to him. After recalling the anecdotes concerning the alleged poetic activity of Plato, it will be convenient to treat the epigrams by their sources, which will allow us to distinguish the reasons for and manners of ascription and at the same time to sketch a chronological development, distinguishing in which age which of the epigrams were ascribed to Plato.

3 The Anecdotes about Plato the Poet

A series of different ancient sources report that Plato was a poet in his youth, before turning to philosophy.23 The oldest of these seems to be Dicaearcus, quoted by Diogenes Laertius:

[x]

Diog. Laert. 3.4-5, ed. Dorandi24


The sources mention poetic works of different genres, but not the epigrams, with the exception of Apuleius (whose testimony will be discussed extensively in section 5 below). Some of the scholars who tried to defend the Platonic authorship of the epigrams insisted on the interest of Plato in poetry.25

Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?

I should say not...

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death...

Because, if I am not mistaken, we shall have to say that about men poets and story-tellers are guilty of making the gravest misstatements when they tell us that wicked men are often happy, and the good miserable; and that injustice is profitable when undetected, but that justice is a man's own loss and another's gain — these things we shall forbid them to utter, and command them to sing and say the opposite.

To be sure we shall, he replied....

Enough of the subjects of poetry ...

If Homer had said, "The priest came, having his daughter's ransom in his hands, supplicating the Achaeans, and above all the kings;" and then if, instead of speaking in the person of Chryses, he had continued in his own person, the words would have been, not imitation, but simple narration. The passage would have run as follows (I am no poet, and therefore I drop the metre), "The priest came and prayed the gods on behalf of the Greeks that they might capture Troy and return safely home, but begged that they would give him back his daughter, and take the ransom which he brought, and respect the God....

And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers....

But shall our superintendence go no further, and are the poets only to be required by us to express the image of the good in their works, on pain, if they do anything else, of expulsion from our State? Or is the same control to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be prohibited from exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and intemperance and meanness and indecency in sculpture and building and the other creative arts; and is he who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be prevented from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our citizens be corrupted by him? We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity, as in some noxious pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their own soul. Let our artists rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the beautiful and graceful; then will our youth dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good in everything; and beauty, the effluence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into likeness and sympathy with the beauty of reason.

There can be no nobler training than that, he replied....

Of the many excellences which I perceive in the order of our State, there is none which upon reflection pleases me better than the rule about poetry.

To what do you refer?

To the rejection of imitative poetry, which certainly ought not to be received; as I see far more clearly now that the parts of the soul have been distinguished.

What do you mean?

Speaking in confidence, for I should not like to have my words repeated to the tragedians and the rest of the imitative tribe — but I do not mind saying to you, that all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them....

And the tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth?

That appears to be so....

Then must we not infer that all these poetical individuals, beginning with Homer, are only imitators; they copy images of virtue and the like, but the truth they never reach? The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling; and his picture is good enough for those who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures.

Quite so.

In like manner the poet with his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colours of the several arts, himself understanding their nature only enough to imitate them; and other people, who are as ignorant as he is, and judge only from his words, imagine that if he speaks of cobbling, or of military tactics, or of anything else, in metre and harmony and rhythm, he speaks very well — such is the sweet influence which melody and rhythm by nature have. And I think that you must have observed again and again what a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.

Yes, he said....

Thus far then we are pretty well agreed that the imitator has no knowledge worth mentioning of what he imitates. Imitation is only a kind of play or sport, and the tragic poets, whether they write in iambic or in Heroic verse, are imitators in the highest degree?

Very true....

Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitated?

Clearly.

And now we may fairly take him and place him by the side of the painter, for he is like him in two ways: first, inasmuch as his creations have an inferior degree of truth — in this, I say, he is like him; and he is also like him in being concerned with an inferior part of the soul; and therefore we shall be right in refusing to admit him into a well-ordered State, because he awakens and nourishes and strengthens the feelings and impairs the reason. As in a city when the evil are permitted to have authority and the good are put out of the way, so in the soul of man, as we maintain, the imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which has no discernment of greater and less, but thinks the same thing at one time great and at another small — he is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the truth.

Exactly.

But we have not yet brought forward the heaviest count in our accusation: — the power which poetry has of harming even the good (and there are very few who are not harmed), is surely an awful thing?

Yes, certainly, if the effect is what you say.

Hear and judge: The best of us, as I conceive, when we listen to a passage of Homer, or one of the tragedians, in which he represents some pitiful hero who is drawling out his sorrows in a long oration, or weeping, and smiting his breast — the best of us, you know, delight in giving way to sympathy, and are in raptures at the excellence of the poet who stirs our feelings most.

Yes, of course I know.

But when any sorrow of our own happens to us, then you may observe that we pride ourselves on the opposite quality — we would fain be quiet and patient; this is the manly part, and the other which delighted us in the recitation is now deemed to be the part of a woman.

Very true, he said.


Now can we be right in praising and admiring another who is doing that which any one of us would abominate and be ashamed of in his own person?

No, he said, that is certainly not reasonable.

Nay, I said, quite reasonable from one point of view.

What point of view?

If you consider, I said, that when in misfortune we feel a natural hunger and desire to relieve our sorrow by weeping and lamentation, and that this feeling which is kept under control in our own calamities is satisfied and delighted by the poets; — the better nature in each of us, not having been sufficiently trained by reason or habit, allows the sympathetic element to break loose because the sorrow is another's; and the spectator fancies that there can be no disgrace to himself in praising and pitying any one who comes telling him what a good man he is, and making a fuss about his troubles; he thinks that the pleasure is a gain, and why should he be supercilious and lose this and the poem too? Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that from the evil of other men something of evil is communicated to themselves. And so the feeling of sorrow which has gathered strength at the sight of the misfortunes of others is with difficulty repressed in our own.

How very true!

And does not the same hold also of the ridiculous? There are jests which you would be ashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comic stage, or indeed in private, when you hear them, you are greatly amused by them, and are not at all disgusted at their unseemliness; — the case of pity is repeated; — there is a principle in human nature which is disposed to raise a laugh, and this which you once restrained by reason, because you were afraid of being thought a buffoon, is now let out again; and having stimulated the risible faculty at the theatre, you are betrayed unconsciously to yourself into playing the comic poet at home.

Quite true, he said.

And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action — in all of them poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.

I cannot deny it.

Therefore, Glaucon, I said, whenever you meet with any of the eulogists of Homer declaring that he has been the educator of Hellas, and that he is profitable for education and for the ordering of human things, and that you should take him up again and again and get to know him and regulate your whole life according to him, we may love and honour those who say these things — they are excellent people, as far as their lights extend; and we are ready to acknowledge that Homer is the greatest of poets and first of tragedy writers; but we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State.

That is most true, he said.

And now since we have reverted to the subject of poetry, let this our defence serve to show the reasonableness of our former judgment in sending away out of our State an art having the tendencies which we have described; for reason constrained us. But that she may impute to us any harshness or want of politeness, let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry; of which there are many proofs, such as the saying of "the yelping hound howling at her lord," or of one "mighty in the vain talk of fools," and "the mob of sages circumventing Zeus," and the "subtle thinkers who are beggars after all"; and there are innumerable other signs of ancient enmity between them. Notwithstanding this, let us assure our sweet friend and the sister arts of imitation that if she will only prove her title to exist in a well-ordered State we shall be delighted to receive her — we are very conscious of her charms; but we may not on that account betray the truth.
I dare say, Glaucon, that you are as much charmed by her as I am, especially when she appears in Homer?

Yes, indeed, I am greatly charmed.

Shall I propose, then, that she be allowed to return from exile, but upon this condition only — that she make a defence of herself in lyrical or some other metre?

Certainly.

And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers — I mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight?

Certainly, he said, we shall the gainers.

If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they think their desires are opposed to their interests, so too must we after the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle. We too are inspired by that love of poetry which the education of noble States has implanted in us, and therefore we would have her appear at her best and truest; but so long as she is unable to make good her defence, this argument of ours shall be a charm to us, which we will repeat to ourselves while we listen to her strains; that we may not fall away into the childish love of her which captivates the many. At all events we are well aware that poetry being such as we have described is not to be regarded seriously as attaining to the truth; and he who listens to her, fearing for the safety of the city which is within him, should be on his guard against her seductions and make our words his law.

Yes, he said, I quite agree with you.

Yes, I said, my dear Glaucon, for great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will any one be profited if under the influence of honour or money or power, aye, or under the excitement of poetry, he neglect justice and virtue?

Yes, he said; I have been convinced by the argument, as I believe that any one else would have been.


-- The Republic, by Plato


Such interest is of course undeniable,26 and one cannot rule out in principle that there might be some truth behind the anecdotes and that Plato might have composed poetry in his youth: however, the analysis of the data (as already stated in section 2 above) shows that none of the extant epigrams can be identified with this alleged poetic production. Even so, the anecdotes concerning this poetic activity of Plato are interesting and may have played a role in the ascription of some of the epigrams.

4 Diogenes Laertius and Pseudo-Aristippus

The most important source for the epigrams ascribed to Plato (apart from the Greek Anthology) is Diogenes Laertius. In the book on the life of Plato, Diogenes elaborates on Plato's poetic activity and quotes 11 epigrams:

[x]

Diog. Laert. 3.29, ed. Dorandi


Diogenes Laërtius (fl. 3rd century AD [200 AD]) was a biographer of the Greek philosophers. Nothing is definitively known about his life, but his surviving Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is a principal source for the history of ancient Greek philosophy. His reputation is controversial among scholars because he often repeats information from his sources without critically evaluating it. He also frequently focuses on trivial or insignificant details of his subjects' lives while ignoring important details of their philosophical teachings and he sometimes fails to distinguish between earlier and later teachings of specific philosophical schools. However, unlike many other ancient secondary sources, Diogenes Laërtius generally reports philosophical teachings without attempting to reinterpret or expand on them, which means his accounts are often closer to the primary sources. Due to the loss of so many of the primary sources on which Diogenes relied, his work has become the foremost surviving source on the history of Greek philosophy.

Laërtius must have lived after Sextus Empiricus (c. 200), whom he mentions, and before Stephanus of Byzantium and Sopater of Apamea (c. 500), who quote him. His work makes no mention of Neoplatonism, even though it is addressed to a woman who was "an enthusiastic Platonist". Hence he is assumed to have flourished in the first half of the 3rd century, during the reign of Alexander Severus (222–235) and his successors.

The precise form of his name is uncertain. The ancient manuscripts invariably refer to a "Laertius Diogenes", and this form of the name is repeated by Sopater and the Suda. The modern form "Diogenes Laertius" is much rarer, used by Stephanus of Byzantium, and in a lemma to the Greek Anthology. He is also referred to as "Laertes" or simply "Diogenes".

The origin of the name "Laertius" is also uncertain. Stephanus of Byzantium refers to him as "Διογένης ὁ Λαερτιεύς" (Diogenes ho Laertieus), implying that he was the native of some town, perhaps the Laerte in Caria (or another Laerte in Cilicia). Another suggestion is that one of his ancestors had for a patron a member of the Roman family of the Laërtii. The prevailing modern theory is that "Laertius" is a nickname (derived from the Homeric epithet Diogenes Laertiade, used in addressing Odysseus) used to distinguish him from the many other people called Diogenes in the ancient world.

His home town is unknown (at best uncertain, even according to a hypothesis that Laertius refers to his origin). A disputed passage in his writings has been used to suggest that it was Nicaea in Bithynia.

It has been suggested that Diogenes was an Epicurean or a Pyrrhonist. He passionately defends Epicurus in Book 10, which is of high quality and contains three long letters attributed to Epicurus explaining Epicurean doctrines. He is impartial to all schools, in the manner of the Pyrrhonists, and he carries the succession of Pyrrhonism further than that of the other schools. At one point, he even seems to refer to the Pyrrhonists as "our school." On the other hand, most of these points can be explained by the way he uncritically copies from his sources. It is by no means certain that he adhered to any school, and he is usually more attentive to biographical details.

In addition to the Lives, Diogenes refers to another work that he had written in verse on famous men, in various metres, which he called Epigrammata or Pammetros (Πάμμετρος).

The work by which he is known, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Greek: Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων; Latin: Vitae Philosophorum), was written in Greek and professes to give an account of the lives and sayings of the Greek philosophers.

Although it is at best an uncritical and unphilosophical compilation, its value, as giving us an insight into the private lives of the Greek sages, led Montaigne to write that he wished that instead of one Laërtius there had been a dozen. On the other hand, modern scholars have advised that we treat Diogenes' testimonia with care, especially when he fails to cite his sources: "Diogenes has acquired an importance out of all proportion to his merits because the loss of many primary sources and of the earlier secondary compilations has accidentally left him the chief continuous source for the history of Greek philosophy"....

His chief authorities were Favorinus and Diocles of Magnesia, but his work also draws (either directly or indirectly) on books by Antisthenes of Rhodes, Alexander Polyhistor, and Demetrius of Magnesia, as well as works by Hippobotus, Aristippus, Panaetius, Apollodorus of Athens, Sosicrates, Satyrus, Sotion, Neanthes, Hermippus, Antigonus, Heraclides, Hieronymus, and Pamphila.

There are many extant manuscripts of the Lives, although none of them are especially old, and they all descend from a common ancestor, because they all lack the end of Book VII. The three most useful manuscripts are known as B, P, and F. Manuscript B (Codex Borbonicus) dates from the 12th century, and is in the National Library of Naples. Manuscript P (Paris) is dated to the 11th/12th century, and is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Manuscript F (Florence) is dated to the 13th century, and is in the Laurentian Library. The titles for the individual biographies used in modern editions are absent from these earliest manuscripts, however they can be found inserted into the blank spaces and margins of manuscript P by a later hand.

There seem to have been some early Latin translations, but they no longer survive. A 10th-century work entitled Tractatus de dictis philosophorum shows some knowledge of Diogenes. Henry Aristippus, in the 12th century, is known to have translated at least some of the work into Latin, and in the 14th century an unknown author made use of a Latin translation for his De vita et moribus philosophorum (attributed erroneously to Walter Burley).

The first printed editions were Latin translations. The first, Laertii Diogenis Vitae et sententiae eorum qui in philosophia probati fuerunt (Romae: Giorgo Lauer, 1472), printed the translation of Ambrogio Traversari (whose manuscript presentation copy to Cosimo de' Medici was dated February 8, 1433) and was edited by Elio Francesco Marchese. The Greek text of the lives of Aristotle and Theophrastus appeared in the third volume of the Aldine Aristotle in 1497. The first edition of the whole Greek text was that published by Hieronymus Froben in 1533. The Greek/Latin edition of 1692 by Marcus Meibomius divided each of the ten books into paragraphs of equal length, and progressively numbered them, providing the system still in use today.

The first critical edition of the entire text, by H.S. Long in the Oxford Classical Texts, was not produced until 1964; this edition was superseded by Miroslav Marcovich's Teubner edition, published between 1999 and 2002. A new edition, by Tiziano Dorandi, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013....

Henricus Aristippus, the archdeacon of Catania, produced a Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius's book in southern Italy in the late 1150s, which has since been lost or destroyed.
Henry Aristippus of Calabria (born in Santa Severina in 1105–10; died in Palermo in 1162), sometimes known as Enericus or Henricus Aristippus, was a religious scholar and the archdeacon of Catania (from c. 1155) and later chief familiaris of the triumvirate of familiares who replaced the admiral Maio of Bari as chief functionaries of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1161.

While the historian of Norman Sicily, John Julius Norwich, believes him to have probably been of Norman extraction despite his Greek surname, Donald Matthew considers it self-evident, based on both his name and occupations, that he was Greek. He was first and foremost a scholar and, even if Greek, he was an adherent of the Latin church.

Aristippus was an envoy to Constantinople (1158-1160) when he received from the emperor Manuel I Comnenus a Greek copy of Ptolemy's Almagest. A student of the Schola Medica Salernitana tracked down Aristippus and his copy on Mount Etna (observing an eruption) and proceeded to give a Latin translation.
Though this was the first translation of the Almagest into Latin, it was not as influential as a later translation into Latin made by Gerard of Cremona from the Arabic. The original manuscript is probably in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice.

Aristippus himself produced the first Latin translation of Plato's Phaedo (1160) and Meno and the fourth book of Aristotle's Meteorologica. He also translated Gregory of Nazianzus at the request of William I of Sicily.

In 1161, William appointed three familiares—Aristippus, Sylvester of Marsico, and the Bishop Palmer—to replace the assassinated Maio. In 1162, Aristippus was suspected of disloyalty by the king and imprisoned. He died probably soon after in that very year. He may have helped himself to some of the royal concubines during the rebellion of 1161.

-- Henry Aristippus, by Wikipedia

Geremia da Montagnone used this translation as a source for his Compedium moralium notabilium (circa 1310) and an anonymous Italian author used it as a source for work entitled Liber de vita et moribus philosophorum (written c. 1317–1320), which reached international popularity in the Late Middle Ages. The monk Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) produced another Latin translation in Florence between 1424 and 1433, for which far better records have survived. The Italian Renaissance scholar, painter, philosopher, and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) borrowed from Traversari's translation of the Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in Book 2 of his Libri della famiglia and modeled his own autobiography on Diogenes Laërtius's Life of Thales.

Diogenes Laërtius's work has had a complicated reception in modern times. The value of his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers as an insight into the private lives of the Greek sages led the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) to exclaim that he wished that, instead of one Laërtius, there had been a dozen. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) criticized Diogenes Laërtius for his lack of philosophical talent and categorized his work as nothing more than a compilation of previous writers' opinions. Nonetheless, he admitted that Diogenes Laërtius's compilation was an important one given the information that it contained. Hermann Usener (1834–1905) deplored Diogenes Laërtius as a "complete ass" (asinus germanus) in his Epicurea (1887). Werner Jaeger (1888–1961) damned him as "that great ignoramus". In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, scholars have managed to partially redeem Diogenes Laertius's reputation as a writer by reading his book in a Hellenistic literary context.

Nonetheless, modern scholars treat Diogenes's testimonia with caution, especially when he fails to cite his sources. Herbert S. Long warns: "Diogenes has acquired an importance out of all proportion to his merits because the loss of many primary sources and of the earlier secondary compilations has accidentally left him the chief continuous source for the history of Greek philosophy." Robert M. Strozier offers a somewhat more positive assessment of Diogenes Laertius's reliability, noting that many other ancient writers attempt to reinterpret and expand on the philosophical teachings they describe, something which Diogenes Laërtius rarely does. Strozier concludes, "Diogenes Laertius is, when he does not conflate hundreds of years of distinctions, reliable simply because he is a less competent thinker than those on whom he writes, is less liable to re-formulate statements and arguments, and especially in the case of Epicurus, less liable to interfere with the texts he quotes. He does, however, simplify."...

He is criticized primarily for being overly concerned with superficial details of the philosophers' lives and lacking the intellectual capacity to explore their actual philosophical works with any penetration. However, according to statements of the 14th-century monk Walter Burley in his De vita et moribus philosophorum, the text of Diogenes seems to have been much fuller than that which we now possess.

-- Diogenes Laertius, by Wikipedia

There follows the quotation of epigrams I (on 'Aster' ), II (on 'Aster'), X (on Dion), VI (on Alexis and Phaedrus), IX (on Archeanassa), III (on Agathon), IV (on an apple), V (on Xanthippe), XI (on the Eretrians buried in Euboea), VII (on Kypris and the Muses), and XXXI (on gold).

Diogenes' testimony raises several issues. The main one concerns Aristippus' work, which has not been transmitted to us except for a few fragments preserved by quotation. It is essential to our discussion to summarize all we know of this work, which has been carried out exhaustively by T. Dorandi.27 Based on the extant fragments, the [x] was supposed to report anecdotes concerning the romantic affairs of tyrants (book 1) and philosophers (book 4), and possibly other well-known people, with the aim of discrediting them. It is clear that Diogenes believes Aristippus to be the same person as Aristippus of Cyrene [435 – c. 356 BCE], pupil of Socrates and founder of the Cyrenaic school. The mention of Arcesilaus, Polemon, and Nicomachus (the son of Aristotle) in the fragments, however, unmistakably shows that the author cannot be the same Aristippus for chronological reasons (it might be useful to call him ps.-Aristippus from now on to avoid any confusion). As far as this fragment is concerned, it is hard to determine the exact extent of the quotation from ps.-Aristippus, i.e. whether Diogenes is quoting all of these epigrams from his work. Wilamowitz's idea that all of the epigrams come from the [x] had been accepted by several scholars, until Page questioned his position.28 According to Page, only the first two epigrams were present in ps.-Aristippus and the repetition of [x] at 3.29, 3.31, 3.33 denotes a plurality of sources. Dorandi agrees with this view but has some reservations about the third epigram (= epigram X, on Dion). Page also observed that the absence of the epigrams quoted by Diogenes in Meleagrian sections of the Greek Anthology is 'evidence (not proof) that they were not in the collection of pseudo-Platonic [Plato: 428-348 BC] epigrams used by Meleager' and so suggests that ps.-Aristippus might have lived in the early imperial period [27 BC – AD 14]. This series of epigrams, as already shown by Weisshaupl,29 must have entered the Anthology through Diogenes Laertius and not through Meleager.
The Epigrams of Meleager of Gadara have been preserved in the Greek Anthology. Meleager made a major contribution to the Anthology, by compiling the first known collection of epigrams, his "Garland", in the early part of the 1st century B.C.; and he included many of his own love poems....

THE INTRODUCTION TO MELEAGER'S "GARLAND"

The names of the poets, whose epigrams have not been preserved in the Anthology, are printed in italics.

1 To whom, dear Muse, do you bring these varied fruits of song, or who was it who wrought this garland of poets? The work was Meleager's, and he laboured on it to give it as a keepsake to glorious Diocles. Many lilies of Anyte he inwove, and many of Moero, of Sappho few flowers, but they are roses; narcissus, too, heavy with the clear song of Melanippides and a young branch of the vine of Simonides; and therewith he wove in the sweet-scented lovely iris of Nossis, the wax for whose writing-tablets Love himself melted; and with it marjoram from fragrant Rhianus, and Erinna's sweet crocus, maiden-hued, the hyacinth of Alcaeus, the vocal poets' flower, and a dark-leaved branch of Samius' laurel.

15 He wove in too the luxuriant ivy-clusters of Leonidas and the sharp needles of Mnasalcas' pine; the deltoid plane-leaves of the song of Pamphilus he plucked intangled with Pancrates' walnut branches; and the graceful poplar leaves of Tymnes, the green wild thyme of Nicias and the spurge of Euphemus that grows on the sands; Damagetus, the dark violet, too, and the sweet myrtle of Callimachus, ever full of harsh honey: and Euphorion's lychnis and the Muses' cyclamen which takes its name from the twin sons of Zeus {Dioscuri}.

25 And with these he inwove Hegesippus' maenad clusters and Perseus' aromatic rush, the sweet apple also from the boughs of Diotimus and the first flowers of Menecrates' pomegranate, branches of Nicaenetus' myrrh, and Phaennus' terebinth, and the tapering wild pear of Simmias; and from the meadow where grows her perfect celery he plucked but a few blooms of Parthenis to inweave with the yellow-eared corn gleaned from Bacchylides, fair fruit on which the honey of the Muses drops.

35 He plaited in too Anacreon's sweet lyric song, and a bloom that may not be sown in verse; and the flower of Archilochus' crisp-haired cardoon - a few drops from the ocean; and therewith young shoots of Alexander's olive and the blue corn-flower of Polycleitus; the amaracus of Polystratus, too, he inwove, the poet's flower, and a fresh scarlet gopher from Antipater, and the Syrian spikenard of Hermodorus; he added the wild field-flowers of Poseidippus and Hedylus, and the anemones of Sicelides {Asclepiades}; yes indeed, and the golden bough of Plato, ever divine, all shining with virtue; and Aratus he set in there, wise in star-lore, cutting the first-born branches from a heaven-seeking palm; and the fair-tressed lotus of Chaeremon mingled with Phaedimus' phlox, and Antagoras' sweetly-turning oxeye, and Theodoridas' newly flowered thyme that loves wine, and the blossom of Phanias' bean and the newly written buds of many others, and with all these the still early white violets of his own Muse.

57 To my friends I make the gift, but this sweet-voiced garland of the Muses is common to all the initiated.

[5.8] { G-P 69 } G

O holy Night, and Lamp, we both chose no confidants but you of our oaths: and he swore to love me and I never to leave him; and you were joint witnesses. But now he says those oaths were written in running water, and you, O Lamp, see him in the bosom of others.

-- Meleager: Epigrams, by attalus.org

The ultimate issue is that we cannot determine precisely the modus operandi of ps.-Aristippus. There seem to be cases of deliberate forgery (cf. section 6.2.4 below), but in the end we cannot tell if he already knew epigrams ascribed to the philosopher or if he composed some himself, or a mixture of the two. We will come back later to this in the analysis of some specific cases.
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Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

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Part 2 of 2

5 Apuleius

We have seen that Apuleius is one of the sources for the anecdotes concerning the poetic activities of Plato. In De dogmate Platonis, a passing reference to tragedies and dithyrambs is made (Apul. De dog. Plat. 1.2, 'picturae non aspernatus artem tragoediis et dithyrambis se utilem finxit')] Google translate: the art of painting, not disparaged, is useful for tragedies and dithyrambs he invented.].
The dithyramb (Ancient Greek: dithyrambos) was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god. Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb." Plato also remarks in the Republic that dithyrambs are the clearest example of poetry in which the poet is the only speaker.

However, in The Apology Socrates went to the dithyrambs with some of their own most elaborate passages, asking their meaning but got a response of, "Will you believe me?" which "showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them."

Plutarch contrasted the dithyramb's wild and ecstatic character with the paean.
A paean is a song or lyric poem expressing triumph or thanksgiving. In classical antiquity, it is usually performed by a chorus, but some examples seem intended for an individual voice (monody). It comes from the Greek παιάν (also παιήων or παιών), "song of triumph, any solemn song or chant". "Paeon" was also the name of a divine physician and an epithet ("byname") of Apollo.

-- Paean, by Wikipedia

According to Aristotle, the dithyramb was the origin of Athenian tragedy. A wildly enthusiastic speech or piece of writing is still occasionally described as dithyrambic.

-- Dithyramb, by Wikipedia

A more relevant passage comes in the Apologia. In section 10, the author is drawing on Plato as an example of a love poet:

(6) Sed Aemilianus, vir ultra Virgilianos opiliones et busequas rusticanus, agrestis quidem semper et barbarus, verum longe austerior, ut putat, Serranis et Curiis et Fabriciis, negat id genus versus Platonico philosopho competere. (7) Etiamne, Aemiliane, si Platonis ipsius exemplo doceo factos? Cuius nulla carmina extant nisi amoris elegia. Nam cetera omnia, credo quod tam lepida non erant, igni deussit. (8) Disce igitur versus Platonis philosophi in puerum Astera, si tamen tantus natu potes litteras discere [Google translate: (6) But Aemilianus, a man beyond the Virgilians, a wine-grower and a rustic indeed always a country man and a barbarian, but far more austere, as he thinks, Serrani and Curii and Fabricius, he denies that kind of verse to the Platonic philosopher to compete (7) Yes, Aemilianus, if I teach the facts by the example of Plato himself? None of his poems exist except love elegies. For all the rest, I believe that they were not so nice, he allowed the fire. (8) Learn then the verses of the philosopher Plato into the child Astera, if you are still so old as to learn letters]:

[x],30
(9) Item eiusdem Platonis in Alexin Phaedrumque pueros coniuncto carmine [Google translate: (9) Also of the same Plato in Alexinus and the Phaedrus combined with the boys poem]:


[x]

[x];31

(10) Ne pluris commemorem, novissimum versum eius de Dione Syracusano si dixero, finem faciam [Google translate: (10) Let me not mention the last line of his about Dion. If I tell Syracusan, I will put an end to it.]:

[x].32

Apul. Apol. 10.6-10, ed. Helm33


Unfortunately, we cannot determine the source for Apuleius' quotations. Whether it was a book of epigrams ascribed to Plato, the work by ps.Aristippus or something else, he seems to know more than three epigrams ('ne pluris commemorem'). The reason for his choice of these specific three might be the pathetic tone, particularly suitable for his argument.

6 The Greek Anthology

6.1 Plato in the Garland of Meleager


In the proem of his Garland (AP 4.1 = Meleager 1 GP), Meleager mentions 47 flowers or plants associated with poets whose poems he collected for his anthology. At II. 47-48 he mentions the golden bough of Plato: [x]. Gow and Page34 suggest that the plant might be the [x] (ivy) or the [x] (fustic). Einarson, however, believes that the plant referred to is the sempervivum arboreum, which is called [x] by Dioscorides (4.88) and, among other names, [x] by ps.-Dioscorides (2.248); he also believes that the association is motivated by Plato's doctrine of the immortality of the soul.35

As far as the source of the epigrams is concerned, Page considers only epigrams XI, XII, XVIII, XIX, and XX to be situated in Meleagrian contexts.[???]36
Epigrams (Plato)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 11/12/22

Text

1 You gaze at the stars, my Star; would that I were Heaven, that I might look at you with many eyes!

2 Even as you shone once the Star of Morning among the living, so in death you shine now the Star of Evening among the dead.

3 The Fates decreed tears to Hecuba and the women of Troy right from their birth; but for you, Dion, the gods spilled your widespread hopes upon the ground after you had triumphed in the doing of noble deeds. And so in your spacious homeland you lie honored by your fellow citizens, O Dion, you who made my heart mad with love.

4 Now, when I have but whispered that Alexis is beautiful, he is the observed of all observers. O my heart, why show dogs a bone? You'll be sorry for it afterwards: was it not so that we lost Phaedrus?

5 My mistress is Archeanassa of Colophon, on whose very wrinkles there is bitter love. Hapless are all you who met such beauty on its first voyage; through what a burning did you pass!

6 When I kiss Agathon my soul is on my lips, where it comes, poor thing, hoping to cross over.

7 I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.

8 I am an apple; one who loves you throws me at you. Say yes, Xanthippe; we fade, both you and I.

9 We are Eretrians of Euboea, but we lie near Susa, alas, how far from home!

10 A man who found some gold left a noose, and the one who did not find the gold he had left tied on the noose he found.

11 I, Laïs, who laughed so disdainfully at Greece and once kept a swarm of young lovers at my door, dedicate this mirror to the Paphian—for I do not wish to see me as I am, and cannot see me as I was.

12 This man was pleasing to foreigners and dear to his fellow citizens—Pindar, servant of the melodious Muses.


13 We once left the sounding waves of the Aegean to lie here amidst the plains of Ecbatana. Fare thee well, renowned Eretria, our former country. Fare thee well, Athens, Euboea's neighbor. Fare thee well, dear Sea.

14 I am the tomb of a ship's captain; the tomb opposite is a farmer's: for beneath the land and beneath the sea is the same place of Death.

15 Sailors, be safe, by sea and on land; I would have you know that the tomb you pass is a shipwrecked man's.

16 Some say there are nine Muses. How thoughtless! Look at Sappho of Lesbos; she makes a tenth.

17 When Cypris saw Cypris at Cnidus, "Alas!" said she; "where did Praxiteles see me naked?"

18 The Graces, seeking for themselves a shrine that would not fall, found the soul of Aristophanes.

— The Eighteen Epigrams, traditionally attributed to Plato

In any case, Meleager clearly believed the epigrams to be authentic and according to Page he must have taken them either from a book circulating around 250 BC or from an anthology. Of course, the Platonic authorship, maybe already considered sound, must have been corroborated by Meleager's inclusion and facilitated the inclusion of other epigrams in anthologies: that is to say, once Meleager's inclusion had legitimized the existence of epigrams 'by Plato' it was easier to ascribe other epigrams to the same author.

6.2 The Erotic Epigrams

6.2.1 The Poems for Aster (I, II)


The first two epigrams, I (AP 7.669) and II (AP 7.670), are rather well-known. Ludwig convincingly defined them as variations on the metaphor of the star as the beloved:37 epigram I expresses the desire of the lover to be the sky, in order to look at his beloved with a thousand eyes (and to be observed by him); epigram II compares the beloved to the morning star during his life and to the evening star after his death. The text of the first one is the following:

[x].38


For the desire expressed, besides the parallels recalled by Ludwig (PMG Carm. Conv. 900-1 [39] and the anonymous AP 5.83, 5.84) [40], one can compare Theoc. Id. 3.12-13 [x].

The second epigram is the following:

[x]


[x].41

The poem is better understood in light of two Greek conceptions, the identification of the morning star with the evening star,42 and the possibility of the departed of dwelling in a star or becoming a star.43

Diogenes and Apuleius
, before quoting epigram I, express their belief that the poem is addressed to a youth called Aster. The wordplay would presuppose a common anecdote about a youth loved by Plato who shared a passion for astronomy, an anecdote not attested anywhere. It is possible instead that 'Aster' is an invention of someone, maybe ps.-Aristippus, who might just have reinterpreted two pre-existing poems (anonymous or by other authors), and the pairing of the poems might have a more recent origin (that is to say, they might have not been conceived as a pair).

6.2.2 Agathon, Alexis, Phaedrus (III, VI)

Epigram III (AP 5.77) is the famous kiss-epigram for a certain Agathon, in which the speaking voice describes his soul coming out of the body during the kiss:44

[x]


The name Agathon must have triggered or allowed the ascription to Plato by reference to the famous tragedian of the same name, who also features in Plato's Symposium, as shown also by the lemma in the Anthology ([x]). As it has been pointed out,45 however, it seems that Agathon was born around 448/447 BC and was therefore some 20 years older than Plato: this would be rather strange for the standard of Greek erotic poetry,46 where usually it is the older [x] who addresses love poetry to the younger [x]. The possibility of a Platonic authorship was reported by Aulus Gellius, who remarks before quoting the epigram:

celebrantur duo isti Graeci versiculi multorumque doctorum hominum memoria dignantur quod sint lepidissimi et venustissimae brevitatis. Neque adeo pauci sunt scriptores qui quidem eos Platonis esse philosophi adfirment, quibus llIe adolescens luserit, cum tragoediis quoque eodem tempore faciendis praeluderet [Google translate: These two Greek verses are celebrated by many learned men; they deserve to be remembered because they are of the most graceful and charming brevity. Neither there are so few writers who indeed claim to be Plato's philosophers, with which he played as a youth, with the tragedies also at the same time would prelude the making.].

Gell. NA 19.11.1, ed. Marshall47


Apollodorus

I believe I have got the story you inquire of pretty well by heart. The day before yesterday I chanced to be going up to town from my house in Phalerum, when one of my acquaintance caught sight of me from behind, some way off, and called in a bantering tone “Hullo, Phalerian! I say, Apollodorus, wait a moment.” So I stopped and waited. Then, “Apollodorus,” he said, “do you know, I have just been looking for you, as I want to hear all about the banquet that brought together Agathon and Socrates and Alcibiades and the rest of that party, and what were the speeches they delivered upon love. For somebody else was relating to me the account he had from Phoenix, son of Philip, and he mentioned that you knew it too. But he could not tell it at all clearly so you must give me the whole story, for you are the most proper reporter of your dear friend's discourses. But first tell me this,” he went on; “were you at that party yourself, or not?” To which my answer was: “You have had anything but a clear account from your informant, if you suppose the party you are asking about to have been such a recent affair that I could be included.” “So I did suppose,” he said. “How so, Glaucon?” said I. “You must know it is many a year that Agathon has been away from home and country, and not yet three years that I have been consorting with Socrates and making it my daily care to know whatever he says or does. Before that time, what with running about at random and thinking I did things, I was the wretchedest man alive; just as you are at present, thinking philosophy is none of your business.” “Instead of jeering at me,” he said, “tell me when it was that this party took place.” “When you and I were only children,” I told him; “on the occasion of Agathon's victory with his first tragedy: the day after that of the dedicatory feast which he and his players held for its celebration.” “Ah, quite a long while ago, it would seem,” said he; “but who gave you the account of it? Socrates himself?” “Goodness, no!” I answered. “It was the person who told Phoenix— Aristodemus of Cydathenaeum, a little man, who went always barefoot. He was of the company there, being one of the chief among Socrates' lovers at that time, I believe. But all the same, I have since questioned Socrates on some details of the story I had from his friend, and he acknowledged them to be in accordance with his account.” “Come then,” he said, “let me have it now; and in fact the road up to town is well suited for telling and hearing as we go along.”

-- Symposium, by Plato


Something similar happens with epigram VI (AP 7.100), a love epigram on Alexis and Phaedrus:

[x]


To declare a youth [x] had a clear erotic value, as shown by Attic vase inscriptions48 and erotic epigrams,49 and that is a fundamental point of the poem. The names mentioned are both connected to Plato in some way: Phaedrus is obviously the name of Socrates' pupil, after whom the dialogue is named; as for Alexis, Diogenes Laertius, before the section with the epigrams ascribed to Plato, quotes two passages concerning Plato by the comic poet Alexis (probably believing that the same Alexis is dealt with). Here too the identification is impossible, given that Phaedrus was 20 years older than Plato and Alexis more than 50 years younger. Two options stand out: either a love poem by someone else featuring two boys named Phaedrus and Alexis was ascribed to Plato (due to the names) or such a poem was deliberately written picking two names which could be referred to Plato.

6.2.3 The Apple, Xanthippe, and Philodemus (IV, V)

Epigrams IV (= AP 5.79) and V (=AP 5.80) draw on the common theme of the apple as a love-token:50 epigram IV is the offer of an apple to a woman with the invite to give up her virginity since she will soon wither, just like the apple;51 epigram V is a love-message sent with an apple to a certain Xanthippe. The text of the two is the following:

[x]52


[x]53 [x]. 54.

Now, while epigram IV is given the heading [x] (scil. [x]) in the Anthology, the authorship of epigram V is more complicated, since it is ascribed to Plato in P. but to Philodemus in PIA.

A further element is added by P. Oxy. 54.3724. a papyrus which presents a series of complex issues.55 The most persuasive hypothesis is that it is a fragment of a scroll which was reused by someone to create a personal anthology of epigrams. Between the recto and the verso it contains 175 epigrammatic incipits, of which 31 were already known (25 of these of certain Philodemean authorship, others unknown). Some scholars believe that all of the epigrams mentioned in the papyrus are by Philodemus.56 though this is up for debate. One of these epigrammatic incipits is [x], which is very similar to the incipit of epigram V ([x]). Though the epigram on the papyrus might be an epigram with a similar opening (a common feature of the genre), it is also possible that the two epigrams are the same (and that [x] is a better reading).57

According to Sider,58 only three possibilities exist with regard to the epigram ascribed to Plato: (a) that it was composed by someone directly under the name of Plato; (b) that it was anonymous and based on the name Xanthippe was variously ascribed to Plato or Philodemus; (c) that it was composed by Philodemus and then ascribed by someone else to Plato on the basis of the name Xanthippe. Sider later re-affirmed the third possibility as the most likely.59 Cameron,60 building on this view, suggested the following dynamic: the epigram, originally by Philodemus, allowed the ascription to Plato because of the presence of the name Xanthippe, and consequently someone ascribed to Plato also epigram IV which is very similar in theme.


6.2.4 A Deliberate Forgery: The Poem for Archeanassa (IX)

Epigram IX is a most peculiar case. It is an erotic epigram for the hetaera Archeanassa which is quoted by Athenaeus (13.589c, [x]) and by Diogenes Laertius as Platonic. Its absence from the Greek Anthology is only apparent: it is plainly an adaptation from AP 7.217 (= Asclepiades of Samos 41 GP). The genesis of the epigram has been outlined persuasively by Ludwig:61 the original epigram by Asclepiades is an epitaph for the hetaera Archeanassa, which has been turned into an erotic epigram by partial changes to some lines.62

It might be useful to compare the two versions. The original by Asclepiades:63

[x]


[x].

The version quoted by Athenaeus:64

[x]

The speaking voice of the original epigram is the tomb of Archeanassa, which holds ([x]) her body. The same verb is to be understood in the imitation as 'possess' in an erotic sense. The past form [x]65 has been changed to [x] to make the courtesan still alive (Diogenes' version, however, has [x]). Then, the Eros of the second line becomes [x], having been [x], and consequently [x] has been inserted in the third line: it would have been odd to say that the past lovers had experienced a sweeter love. A general change to Ionic forms from Doric ones can also be observed.66 The overall message of the new epigram is an expression of love for an old courtesan, whose current lover (the speaking voice) wonders how harsh she was in her youth if she is still [x] in her old age. It is also interesting to observe that the imitation was known to the so-called Corrector (C) of the Anthology, who inserted the variants in the margin of Asclepiades' epigram.

The epigram is cleverly adapted. The image of love as a flower to pick is replaced by the metaphor of sailing ([x]), thus creating a neat contrast between water and fire imagery. The theme of the attractiveness of the courtesan despite her old age is picked up by Philodemus in AP 5.13 and inspired later epigrammatists. We do not know the author of the second epigram (one might suspect ps.-Aristippus), but at any rate he was no clumsy poet.
His work clearly shows that in the formation of the corpus of the epigrams deliberate forgeries occurred.


6.2.5 The Epitaph for Dion of Syracuse (X)

Epigram X (= AP 7.99, an epitaph for Dion of Syracuse with a final expression of love) is a borderline case, since it is the epigram which raised most doubts about its possible authenticity:

[x]


The epigram is also quoted by Diogenes Laertius, Apuleius (only the last line)67 and Suidas (II. 1-2, s.v. [x], y 214). Diogenes adds that the epitaph was inscribed on the tomb of Dion at Syracuse ([x]), which has been rejected by modern scholars.

In the last century, two scholars have tried in slightly different ways to argue for the authenticity of this specific epigram. Bowra68 argued that the epigram bears resemblances to several Platonic passages, especially Letter 7 [Seventh Letter], so strong that its author cannot be anyone but Plato; he also argues that the mention of Eros in the last line must be intended in the sense of philosophical Eros.

What are the reasons for assuming the genuineness of the Seventh Letter? For thus the problem must be put, as no one would deny. The genuineness of letters presumably written in the fourth century is always open to suspicion. And the history of the attestation of the Seventh Letter does not even provide evidence to the effect that the letter was known in the time in which it was ostensibly written. Despite the richness of its information, it is not mentioned by Aristotle or any of the members of the Old Academy or of the Peripatus. A collection of Platonic letters is included in early Hellenistic catalogues of Platonic writings, but the Seventh Letter is quoted and referred to as Platonic for the first time by Cicero ... no one is known to have made use of the letter before the first century B.C....

The result of my investigation, I confess, is that the Seventh Letter cannot be genuine. If one begins, as I have done, by assuming that the letter is what it purports to be, one soon becomes more and more doubtful; the further one reads, the more one meets with assertions which can hardly have been made by Plato; finally, one is forced to give up the belief in the Platonic origin of the letter.


-- Plato's seventh letter, by Ludwig Edelstein


H. Herter,69 on the other hand, while reprising some of Bowra's arguments, shifted the focus to the contrast between Moirai and the daimones and his ultimate interpretation of the epigram is that Plato, the speaking voice, is genuinely saddened by the death of Dion and cannot do anything but blame a superior entity for it. Bowra's explanation was deemed to be perfectly convincing by Ludwig, who believes the Dion epigram to be the only possibly authentic epigram of the corpus. Only Page denied its authenticity,70 stating that the Eros of this epigram can only have sexual connotations, and defining the style of the epigram as mediocre.

It will be useful to carry out an analysis of the text before discussing the alleged authenticity. Firstly, it might be rash to define the style of the poem as mediocre.71 The diction presents Homeric echoes: the plural form [x], the forms [x] for which cf. Homeric [x], [x], [x], and [x] for which cf. Homeric [x], the Homeric adjective [x]. Secondly, the phrasing is not clumsy: a parallel structure can be observed in [x] (object, addressee, verb in the aorist + addressee, object, verb in the aorist). Finally, Page's criticism of the expression [x] (to be understood as they spilt wide hopes) might be unjustified. The sense of [x] meaning disperse is not unparalleled: cf. e.g. Aesch. Pers. 826 [x], Soph. El. 1291 [x], Pl. Resp. 553b. [x]. Besides, similar expressions are later to be found in some funerary inscriptions lamenting children who have died at a young age and whose deaths crush the parents' hopes: cf. e.g. [x].72

As far as the Platonic authorship is concerned, the arguments in favour of it do not seem compelling. The parallels with Letter 7 are not decisive insofar as the Platonic authorship of such text is not unanimous among scholars.73 Alleged philosophical implications of the poem, if one really wants to find them, can be explained easily (as Page does) by admitting the familiarity of the author of the poem with Letter 7. One can only say that the poem must have been composed after 353 BC, i.e. the year of Dion's death, and even if one admits that the text is older than the other poems (i.e. pre-Hellenistic), this does not prove Platonic authorship per se. Given the popularity of the theme of the thread of the Moirai in Hellenistic literature (e.g. Theoc. Id. 1.139-40) and the dynamics of interpolation [the insertion of something of a different nature into something else] and ascriptions mentioned above, we can rule out neither a later date of composition nor the ascription to Plato of an actual, anonymous epitaph for Dion of Syracuse. Among all of the cases, such a composition would have had the best reason for being ascribed to the philosopher. As for the last line of the poem, one can even suggest a later interpolation [the insertion of something of a different nature into something else] in a pre-existing epitaph, since it might sound slightly detached from the rest of the poem.

6.3 Sepulchral, Echprastic, and Miscellaneous Epigrams: Further Problems in the Ascriptions

Investigating extensively all of the problems of authenticity and ascriptions in the corpus would go beyond the scope of this contribution and certainly requires further study. However, though the treatment of the erotic subgroup of epigrams already shows many of such issues, a quick glance at the remaining part of the corpus will suffice to give an idea of other factors at play. This encompasses sepulchral epigrams (XI, XII, XVIII, XIX, XX), ecphrastic epigrams (XVII, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX and XXX), and epigrams of miscellaneous nature (VII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII and XXXI).

Among these epigrams, one can distinguish two categories. The first one consists of the ecphrastic epigrams. Three of the epigrams ascribed to Plato bear the heading [x] (XXVIII = AP 9.748, XXIX = AP 9.751, XXX = AP 9.13), of which the first is a shorter version of Philip AP 9.11 and Antiphilus 9.13b, and the other two are ecphrastic distichs on works of art. Page reasonably suggests that the other three epigrams on works of art and headed simply [x] should be ascribed to the same author,74 whom he places in the middle of the 1st century AD given the influence of authors of Philip's garland:75 these are XXVII = AP 9.747, and then XXVI = AP 16.161 and XXIV = AP 16.248. In his treatment of the Plato Junior, Page actually ascribes to him also XXV = AP 16.160 = Plato Junior VI (on the Cnidian Aphrodite). One wonders if XXII and XXIII ('9.826' and '8.827' respectively, from the minor sylloge [x]) might also be ascribed to Plato Junior. In any case, these poems would fall into the category of 'unintentional ' pseudepigraphical works (referred to in section 2 above) due to homonymous authors.

Lastly, there is a range of cases where the reasons for the ascription is not at all clear, or hypothetical at best. The ascription of epigrams XI and XII (epitaphs for some Eretrians buried in Persia), for example, has been motivated by the fact that Plato recounts the fate of these Eretrians in Leg. 3.698b and Men. 240a.76 In a similar way, epigram XV (=AP 9.51, on the changing power of time) might have received an undue philosophical interpretation and ascribed to the philosopher on the basis of the most famous Platonic passage on the distinction between Aion and Chronos (Tim. 37d): a superficial reading of the epigram might have led to its ascription to Plato.77


When the Father who begat the world saw the image which he had made of the Eternal Gods moving and living, he rejoiced; and in his joy resolved, since the archetype was eternal, to make the creature eternal as far as this was possible. Wherefore he made an image of eternity which is time, having an uniform motion according to number, parted into months and days and years, and also having greater divisions of past, present, and future. These all apply to becoming in time, and have no meaning in relation to the eternal nature, which ever is and never was or will be; for the unchangeable is never older or younger, and when we say that he 'was' or 'will be,' we are mistaken, for these words are applicable only to becoming, and not to true being; and equally wrong are we in saying that what has become IS become and that what becomes IS becoming, and that the non-existent IS non-existent...These are the forms of time which imitate eternity and move in a circle measured by number.

Thus was time made in the image of the eternal nature; and it was created together with the heavens, in order that if they were dissolved, it might perish with them. And God made the sun and moon and five other wanderers, as they are called, seven in all, and to each of them he gave a body moving in an orbit, being one of the seven orbits into which the circle of the other was divided. He put the moon in the orbit which was nearest to the earth, the sun in that next, the morning star and Mercury in the orbits which move opposite to the sun but with equal swiftness—this being the reason why they overtake and are overtaken by one another. All these bodies became living creatures, and learnt their appointed tasks, and began to move, the nearer more swiftly, the remoter more slowly, according to the diagonal movement of the other. And since this was controlled by the movement of the same, the seven planets in their courses appeared to describe spirals; and that appeared fastest which was slowest, and that which overtook others appeared to be overtaken by them. And God lighted a fire in the second orbit from the earth which is called the sun, to give light over the whole heaven, and to teach intelligent beings that knowledge of number which is derived from the revolution of the same. Thus arose day and night, which are the periods of the most intelligent nature; a month is created by the revolution of the moon, a year by that of the sun. Other periods of wonderful length and complexity are not observed by men in general; there is moreover a cycle or perfect year at the completion of which they all meet and coincide...To this end the stars came into being, that the created heaven might imitate the eternal nature.

-- Timaeus, by Plato


There are some cases, however, in which the reason for the ascription is unclear, e.g. epigram VII (AP 9.39, on Aphrodite and the Muses), epigram VIII (AP 6.1, on the mirror of Lais, a courtesan) and epigram XIII (AP 9.506 on Sappho the tenth Muse). Whether the ascription to Plato was intentional or it originated during the rearrangements of the epigrammatic collections throughout the centuries and in different media, it is likely that the ascription took place after a core of pseudo-Platonic epigrams had already been established.

7 Conclusions

After analyzing in detail the sources and the possible reasons for the ascription of the epigrams to Plato, we can attempt to draw some conclusions and sketch a hypothetical history of the corpus.

Sometime after Plato's death, legends and anecdotes about his alleged poetic activities must have spread (they might have gained strength later, after the appearance of some of the epigrams). At some point towards the end of the 4th century BC, someone must have composed epigrams deliberately under the name of Plato, or collected pre-existing poems under his name (or both at once) possibly in the form of a poetry book. Such an alleged book might have been the source for Meleager, who weaved some of its poems into his Garland (which is preserved only partially in the Greek Anthology). Not too much later, possibly in the early imperial period, someone under the name of Aristippus collected some epigrams allegedly by Plato: his activity might have included new ascriptions of pre-existing epigrams of other authors or anonymous, interpolations in pre-existing epigrams or even deliberate forgeries. It is hard to draw the line between what had already been done before ps.-Aristippus and what can be attributed to him. The [x] was later used as a source by Diogenes Laertius (we do not know to which extent), possibly together with other sources, to list some epigrams ascribed to the philosopher. The epigrams present in Diogenes then entered into the Anthology. Once a certain number of epigrams had been ascribed openly to Plato, it was possible for other epigrams (presumably anonymous) to be ascribed to the philosopher on different grounds. The possibility of mechanical errors, especially of epigrams which bear more than one ascription,78 cannot be excluded given the complex dynamics of ascriptions behind the poems of Greek Anthology.19

In light of this picture, it is clear that the label 'ps.-Plato' hides a complex history. It must be kept in mind that it encompasses a series of poems which were likely to be composed in different ages (most of them presumably from the Hellenistic age onwards), by different poets, and with different purposes, and with no uniformity in language or style. Not even their ascription to Plato is uniform: it is stated with different degrees of certainty and plausibility, in different sources, and originated for very different purposes through different poetic processes.
Thus, among pseudepigraphical epigrammatic collections, the corpus of pseudo-Platonic epigrams represents a rather unique and interesting case.

Tab. 1: The epigrams ascribed to Plato: a prospectus. The sigla of the manuscripts are those adopted by EG. According to the common convention, epigrams of the Appendix Planudea (API) are quoted as book 16 of AP. Unless otherwise stated [s.a.n.], the 'other sources' ascribe the epigrams to Plato (or at least record the ascription) when quoting them.

EG / FGE / AP / Heading / Other sources / Sub-genre

I / I / 7.669 / [P] [x] [Pl] [x] [C] [x] / Diog. Laert. 3.29; Apostol. 4.12a Apul. Apol. 10 / Erotic
II / II / 7.670 / [C] [x] [scuk, [x]] [Pl] s.a.n. / Diog. Laert. 3.29; Apul. Apol. 10; Apostol. 4.12b / Erotic
III / III / 5.77(caret Pl) / [P] [x] / Diog. Laert. 3.32; Gell. NA 19.11.1 Syll. S. s.a.n. / Erotic
IV / IV / 5.79 / [P] [x] [scil. [x]] [Pl] s.a.n. / Diog. Laert. 3.32 / Erotic
V / V / 5.80 / [P] [x] [scil. [x]] [Pl] [x] [scil. [x]] / Diog. Laert. 3.32
VI / VI / 7.100 / [PPl] [x] / Diog. Laert. 3.31; Apul. Apol. 10 / Erotic
VII / VII / 9.39 / [CPl] [x] / Diog. Laert. 3.33 / Epideictic
VIII / VIII / 6.1 / [PPl] [x] / Olymp. in Alcib. 1.31 Westerink, [vv.3-4). Syll. E 16 / Erotic
IX / IX / [cf. AP 7.217 = Ascl. XXXIV GP] / -- / Diog. Laert. 3.31; Ath. 13.589c / Erotic
X / X / 7.99 / [P] [x] [Pl] [x] / Diog. Laert. 3.30; Apul. Apol. 10 [v.6]; Suidas s.v. [x] (y 214) [vv. 1-2) (s.a.n.) / Erotic/Speulchral
XI / XI / 7.259 / [C] [x] [Pl] s.a.n. / Diog. Laert. 3.33; Suidas, s.v. [x] ([x] 545); schol. Hermog. Rhet. Gr. 7.1; An. Ox. Cramer 4.154.10 (s.a.n.) / Sepulchral
XII / XII / 7.256 / [CPl] [x] / Philostr. VA 1.24 (s.a.n.) / Sepulchral
XIII /XIII / 9.506 / [PPl] [x] / -- / Epideictic
XIV / XIV / -- / -- / Vita Aristophanis 52 Koster; Olymp. Vita Plat 2.70 Westerink; Prol. in Plat. phil. 3.9 Westerink / Epideictic
XV / XV / 9.51 / [CPl] [x] / [x] (sub fine AP lib. Xl) Syll. E 47 / Epideictic
XVI / XVI/ '9.823' ([x]) / [Pl] [x] / -- / --
XVII / XVII / 16.13 / [Pl] [x] / Syll. E (s.a.n.) / Ecphrastic
XVIII / XVIII / 7.368 / [CPl] [x] / Syll. E 52 (s.a.n.) / Sepulchral
XIX / XIX / 7.265 / [CPl] [x] / -- / Sepulchral
XX / XX / 7.269 / [CPl] [x] [C] [x] / Syll. E 53 (s.a.n.) / Sepulchral
XXI / XXI / 6.43 / [P] [x] [Pl] [x] / -- / Epideictic
XXII / XXII (a) / '9.826' [x] / [Pl] [x] / [x] (s.a. n.) / Echprastic
XXIII / XXII / '9.827' [x] / [x] [x] [Pl] [x] [scil. [x]] / -- / Ecphrastic
XXIV / -- / 16.248 / [Pl] [x] / -- / Ecphrastic
XXV / XXIII / 16.160 / [Pl] [x] / [x] (tertia post Indicem in AP pagina) / Ecphrastic
XXVI / -- / 16.161 / [x] [x] [scil.] [x]] [Pl] [x] / [x] (tertia post indicem in AP pagina) Syll. S. (s.a.n.) / Ecphrastic
XXVII / -- / 9.747 / [PPl] [x] / -- / Ecphrastic
XXVIII / - / 8.748 / [PPl] [x] / [x] (post AP 11. 441) / Ecphrastic
XXIX / -- / 9.751 / [PPl] [x] [P] [x] / -- / Ecphrastic
XXX / -- /9.13 / [PPl] [x] / -- / Epideictic

 
_______________

Notes:

1 I wish to thank the anonymous peer reviewer for the useful criticism which allowed me to improve the article considerably, as well as Luca Bettarini and Laura Lulli who supervised this work from its earliest stages, Marco Pelucchi (who is devoting his doctoral thesis to the pseudo-Platonic epigrams) for the useful comments and advice, the audiences in Bari and Oxford for the feedback, and Phillip Bone for proofreading the English. I am of course solely responsible for my views and any mistakes.

2 For some general considerations on pseudepigraphical literature, cf. the Introduction of this volume.

3 Page (1975), from now on = EG.

4 Page (1981), from now on = FGE.

5 The reasons for this are given in Page (1981) 125. Of the remaining seven epigrams, six are included in the section Plato Junior (cf. below, section 6.3)

6 I will subsequently refer to the epigrams with the numbers in EG rather than FGE: cf. the table at the end.

7 I will mainly refer to categories outlined in D'Ippolito (2000).

8 An exception would be that of 'unintentional' forgeries, e.g. Theoc. Id. 8 in the reconstruction of Rossi (2000) who thinks that the poem is spurious but very soon entered the Theocritean corpus.

9 For an example of confusion between similar names, cf. the chapter 'Semonides or Simonides? A Century-Long Controversy over the Authorship of a Greek Elegiac Fragment' by Elisa Nuria Merisio in this volume.


10 On ancient attempts to distinguish homonymous writers cf. the chapter 'Distinguishing Homonymous Writers, Detecting Spurious Works: Demetrius of Magnesia's On Poets and Authors with the Same Name' by Pietro Zaccaria in this volume.

11 For Simonides, cf. Bravi (2006).

12 For Theocritus, cf. Rossi (2001).

13 In general, as a premise, cf. Page (1981) 125-30.

14 Hermann (1839) 101.

15 PLG II 295-9.

16 Reitzenstein (1893) 181-8; cf. also Reitzenstein (1921) with a slightly different position.

17 Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1924) I 131.

18 Bowra (1938) 395-7.

19 Ludwig (1963).

20 Page(1981) 125-6.

21 Ludwig (1963) 62. Similar arguments had already been presented by Fava (1901) 1-19, who extended the conclusions to more epigrams. Somewhat isolated in this context is the defence of the authenticity by Del Re (1931) whose arguments are often far-fetched.

22 One might regard epigram X as a borderline case of a possibly pre-Hellenistic poem (which would not prove Platonic authorship per se), but cf. section 6.2.5 below for the specific problems of that.

23 All of the sources are listed by Riginos (1976) 43.

24 Dorandi (2013).

25 E.g. Del Re (1931) 498.

26 On Plato and poetry, cf. Giuliano (2005).

27 Dorandi (2007a).

28 Page (1981) 127 who builds on previous points by other scholars.

29 Weisshaupl (1889) 34-38.

30 = epigram I.

31 = epigram II.

32 = epigram X, I. 6.

33 Helm (1972).

34 Gow/Page (1965) 604.

35 Einarson (1943); cf. also Kirsopp Michels (1945).

36 Page (1981) 125.

37 Ludwig (1963) 78- 79.

38 = epigram I.

39 [x] (901).

40 [x] (AP 5.83); [x] (AP 5.84): dating the two poems is hard, but it is plausible that they are Hellenistic (as Ludwig thinks).

41 = epigram II.

42 Which according to ancient sources was first stated by Parmenides (fr. 28A I 16 D.- K.) and Ibycus (PMG 331). The problem was probably discussed by Callimachus (fr. 442 Pfeiffer), who also alluded to it in the Hecale (F 291.3 Pfeiffer = fr. 113 Hollis). The evening star is deemed as the most beautiful already in Hom. Il. 22.317-8, [x].

43 E.g. Ar. Pax 832-3 [x] (cf. Olson (1998] ad lac. for more sources and parallels).

44 For this image, Page (1981) 163 recalls several parallels, e.g. Bion Epitaph. Adon. 11.46-47 [x] ( ... ).

45 E.g. Ludwig (1963) 71.

46 Cf. 39 Agathon T3 in TrGFI.

47 Cf. Marshall (1968). After quoting epigram III, Gellius then presents an interesting Latin poem inspired by this epigram (usually called 'incerti odarium'), whose authorship has much been discussed and for which cf. Setaioli (2015) with bibliography.

48 Cf. Dover (1978) 120-2.

49 E.g. the anonymous AP 12.130, II. 1-2 [x].

50 For which cf. Gow (1952) on Theoc. Id. 5.88: among the most well-known Hellenistic examples, apart from several places in Theocritus (listed by Gow), there is the story of Acontius and Cydippe in Callimachus (frr. 67- 75 Pfeiffer / Harder = frr. 166-74 Massimilla).

51 A notable parallel for this is Asclepiades, AP 5.85, [x].

52 = epigram IV.

S3 Cameron and Sider prefer the reading [x], for which see below in this paragraph.

54 = epigram V.

SS The editio princeps is by Parsons in Coles et al. (1987). The most recent study of the papyrus is Maltomini (2003).

56 See Cameron (1993); Sider (1997) 203-5 believes that most of the incipits are of epigrams by Philodemus.

57 Cameron (1993) believes so and adduces to this argument the translation of Epigr. Bob. 32, 'malum ego: mittit me quidam tibi munus amator' [Google translate: I am bad: someone sends me to you role lover.]. Cf. also Mariotti (1967).

58 Sider (1987) 321.

59 Sider (1989) 234.

60 Cameron (1993) 386-7.

61 Ludwig (1963).

62 Ludwig recalls the similar example of 'Empedocles' I and 'Simonides' AP 7.508).

63 The text is that of Sens (2011) who prefers to generalize the Doric forms even if they are not consistent in the manuscript tradition, cf. below.

64 I quote the text according to FGE.

65 According to Sens (2011) 283, the form [x] is in itself ambiguous because it could stand both for [x] and [x] and this would be a deliberate choice of Asclepiades.

66 One must, however, take into account Sens' warning that his text generalizes Doric forms which are not uniform in the manuscript tradition: cf. Sens (2011) lxv-lxxii.

67 Cf. section 5 above.

68 Bowra (1938).

69 Herter (1944).

70 Page (1981) 169.

71 The only oddity which resists any objection is really [x]: generally,  [x] only means victory song in the singular, while the plural [x] means sacrifices for the victory, and the verb here should go with the latter meaning.

72 Martinez Fernandez (2006), inscription n. 28. Martinez Fernandez also recalls several parallels in the meaning, e.g. [x] (GVI 1420 Chios, 1st century BC), [x] (GVI 1594.4, Macedonia, 2nd century BC?), [x] (SEG 27.403. Tomis, end of 2nd / beginning of 3rd century BC)

73 Many scholars engaged in the debate, especially during the last century: for the sake of convenience, I limit myself to pointing to the recent status quaestionis in Forcignano (2020) 9-16, 47-53 with bibliography.

74 Page(1981) 125.

75 Page (1981) 82.

76 Preger (1891) 213 and accepted by Page (1981) 172.

77 Cf. also the useful observations in Degani (2001) 35-39.

78 Cf. Page (1981) 125.

79 For the headings and ascriptions of the epigrams of the Greek Anthology. cf. Gow (1958).
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