Vitae philosophorum

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[*](Nauck, T.G.F.2, Eur. 300.):

Alas! But why Alas? We have suffered the lot of mortals.

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;

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.[*](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 epigram[*](Anth. 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.

Arcesilaus, the son of Seuthes, according to Apollodorus in the third book of his Chronology, came from Pitane in Aeolis. With him begins the Middle Academy; he was the first to suspend his judgement owing to the contradictions of opposing arguments. He was also the first to argue on both sides of a question, and the first to meddle with the system handed down by Plato and, by means of question and answer, to make it more closely resemble eristic.

At first, before he left Pitane for Athens, he was a pupil of the mathematician Autolycus, his fellow-countryman, and with him he also travelled to Sardis. Next he studied under Xanthus, the musician, of Athens; then he was a pupil of Theophrastus. Lastly, he crossed over to the Academy and joined Crantor. For while his brother Moereas, who has already been mentioned, wanted to make him a rhetorician, he was himself devoted to philosophy, and Crantor, being enamoured of him, cited the line from the Andromeda of Euripides[*](Nauck, T.G.F.2, Eur. 129.):

O maiden, if I save thee, wilt thou be grateful to me?

Take me, stranger, whether for maidservant or for wife.

After that they lived together. Whereupon Theophrastus, nettled at his loss, is said to have remarked, What a quick-witted and ready pupil has left my school! For, besides being most effective in argument and decidedly fond of writing books, he also took up poetry. And there is extant an epigram of his upon Attalus which runs thus[*](Anth. Plan. iii. 56.):

Pergamos, not famous in arms alone, is often celebrated for its steeds in divine Pisa. And if a mortal may make bold to utter the will of heaven, it will be much more sung by bards in days to come.