Chapter 5. CRANTOR
(Perhaps about 340-290 B.C.)
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24]
Crantor of Soli, though he was much esteemed in
his native country, left it for Athens and attended
the lectures of Xenocrates at the same time as
Polemo. He left memoirs extending to 30,000
lines, some of which are by some critics attributed
to Arcesilaus. He is said to have been asked what
it was in Polemo that attracted him, and to have
replied, "The fact that I never heard him raise or
lower his voice in speaking." He happened to fall
ill, and retired to the temple of Asclepius, where he
proceeded to walk about. At once people flocked
round him in the belief that he had retired thither,
not on account of illness, but in order to open a
school. Among them was Arcesilaus, who wished to
be introduced by his means to Polemo, notwithstanding the affection which united the two, as will be
related in the Life of Arcesilaus.
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25]
However, when
he recovered, he continued to attend Polemo's
lectures, and for this he was universally praised. He
is also said to have left Arcesilaus his property, to
the value of twelve talents. And when asked by
him where he wished to be buried, he answered
1:
Sweet in some nook of native soil to
rest.
It is also said that he wrote poems and deposited
them under seal in the temple of Athena in his
native place. And Theaetetus the poet writes thus
of him
2:
Pleasing to men, more pleasing to the Muses, lived Crantor,
and never saw old age. Receive, O earth, the hallowed
dead; gently may he live and thrive even in the world
below.
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26]
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 Bellerophon
3:
Alas! But why Alas? We have suffered the lot of
mortals.
And it is said that there are extant
4 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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27]
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.
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.5 He died before Polemo and
Crates, his end being hastened by dropsy. I have
composed upon him the following epigram
6:
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.
