| |Grand document=-Lettre du 29 mai 1717 (de Constantinople) : « I have already made some progress in a collection of Greek medals. Here are several professed antiquaries, who are ready to serve anybody that desires them, but you can’t imagine how they stare in my face, when I enquire about ’em, as if nobody was permitted to seek after medals till they were grown a piece of antiquity themselves. ...you are not to suppose these antiquaries (who are all Greeks) know anything. Their trade is only to sell. They have correspondents at Aleppo, Grand Cairo, in Arabia, and Palestine, who send them all they can find, and very often great heaps that are only fit to melt into pans and kettles. They get the best price they can for any of ’em, without knowing those that are valuable from those that are not. Those that pretend to skill, generally find out the image of some saint in the medals of the Greek cities. One of them, showing me the figure of a Pallas with a victory in her hand on a reverse, assured me it was the Virgin holding a crucifix. The same man, offered me the head of a Socrates on a sardonyx, and to enhance the value gave him the title of Saint Augustine. » (Montagu 1763, Lettre XXXV, p. 179-181; Halsband 1977, I, p. 360-365; Grundy 1999, p. 163; Woolf 2003, p. 241 n. 82; Chung 2011, pp. 186-93, letter 35; Burnett 2020b, p. 571; Pinault 2022, p. 172, note 66). | | |Grand document=-Lettre du 29 mai 1717 (de Constantinople) : « I have already made some progress in a collection of Greek medals. Here are several professed antiquaries, who are ready to serve anybody that desires them, but you can’t imagine how they stare in my face, when I enquire about ’em, as if nobody was permitted to seek after medals till they were grown a piece of antiquity themselves. ...you are not to suppose these antiquaries (who are all Greeks) know anything. Their trade is only to sell. They have correspondents at Aleppo, Grand Cairo, in Arabia, and Palestine, who send them all they can find, and very often great heaps that are only fit to melt into pans and kettles. They get the best price they can for any of ’em, without knowing those that are valuable from those that are not. Those that pretend to skill, generally find out the image of some saint in the medals of the Greek cities. One of them, showing me the figure of a Pallas with a victory in her hand on a reverse, assured me it was the Virgin holding a crucifix. The same man, offered me the head of a Socrates on a sardonyx, and to enhance the value gave him the title of Saint Augustine. » (Montagu 1763, Lettre XXXV, p. 179-181; Halsband 1977, I, p. 360-365; Grundy 1999, p. 163; Woolf 2003, p. 241 n. 82; Chung 2011, pp. 186-93, letter 35; Burnett 2020b, p. 571; Pinault 2022, p. 172, note 66). |