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.

Crantor of Soli was born in Cilicia around 340 BC and came as a young man to Athens, where he joined the Academy under Xenocrates and became the close associate of Polemo and Crates of the so-called Old Academy. Diogenes Laertius preserves a brief life and a list of his works, including the celebrated dialogue On Grief, which was held in such esteem that Cicero used it as the principal source for the third book of his Tusculan Disputations.

He composed the first commentary ever written on Plato's Timaeus, of which substantial fragments survive in Plutarch and Proclus; he also left epigrams and a body of philosophical letters. None of his works has come down complete; Cicero, Plutarch, and Proclus are the principal witnesses.

Crantor's importance lies in two roles: as the founder of the literary genre of philosophical consolation, working out the Academic doctrine of moderate emotion against Stoic apatheia and a popular epicureanism, and as the first exegete of the cosmology of the Timaeus, whose reading of the world's generation as a metaphor rather than a temporal creation set the terms of every later debate on the eternity of the cosmos. He is reported to have died at Athens around 275 BC.