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Crantor admired Homer and Euripides above all other poets; it is hard, he said, at once to write tragedy and to stir the emotions in the language of everyday life. And he would quote the line from the story of BellerophonNauck, T.G.F.2, Eur. 300.: Alas! But why Alas? We have suffered the lot of mortals. And it is said that there are extantAnth. Plan. iii. 60. these lines of the poet Antagoras, spoken by Crantor on Love: My mind is in doubt, since thy birth is disputed, whether I am to call thee, Love, the first of the immortal gods, the eldest of all the children whom old Erebus and queenly Night brought to birth in the depths beneath wide Ocean;
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or art thou the child of wise Cypris, or of Earth, or of the Winds? So many are the goods and ills thou devisest for men in thy wanderings. Therefore hast thou a body of double form.
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He was also clever at inventing terms. For instance, he said of a tragic player’s voice that it was unpolished and unpeeled. And of a certain poet that his verses abounded in miserliness. And that the disquisitions of Theophrastus were written with an oyster-shell. His most highly esteemed work is the treatise On Grief.Legimus omnes Crantoris, veteris Academici, de luctu; est enim non magnus, verum aureolus et, ut Tuberoni Panaetius praecipit, ad verbum ediscendus libellus (Cic. Ac. Pr. ii. 44). He died before Polemo and Crates, his end being hastened by dropsy. I have composed upon him the following epigramAnth. Plan. ii. 381.: The worst of maladies overwhelmed you, Crantor, and thus did you descend the black abyss of Pluto. While you fare well even in the world below, the Academy and your country of Soli are bereft of your discourses.
Chapter 6. ARCESILAUS (c. 318-242 B.C.)
