of twelve talents; and that, being asked by him where he would like to be buried, he said:—
VI. It is said also that he wrote poems, and that he sealed them up in the temple of Minerva, in his own country; and Theætetus the poet wrote thus about him:—
And of all writers, Crantor admired Homer and Euripides most; saying that the hardest thing possible was to write tragically and in a manner to excite sympathy, without departing from nature; and he used to quote this line out of the Bellerophon:—
The following verses of Antagoras the poet are also attributed to Crantor; the subject is love, and they run thus:—
And he was very ingenious at devising new words and expressions; accordingly, he said that one tragedian had an unhewn (ἀπελέκητος) voice, all over bark; and he said that the verses of a certain poet were full of moths; and that the propositions of Theophrastus had been written on an oyster shell. But the work of his which is most admired is his book on Mourning.