Crantor c. 340 BC – c. 275 BC

Crantor of Soli was a Greek philosopher of the Old Academy and the first systematic commentator on Plato's Timaeus. A pupil of Xenocrates and the close friend and associate of Polemo, he played a leading role in the Academy of the late fourth and early third centuries BC. His treatise On Grief, written for his friend Hippocles on the loss of a son, became the foundational work of Greek consolation literature and provided the principal source for Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. His surviving fragments mark him as a philosopher of moderation, for whom virtue is sufficient but external goods are not to be despised.