Crantor's Ethical Side: The Treatise On Grief and Other Related Questions

The aim of this chapter is to identify the main features and to draw a coherent picture of Crantor’s ethics according to his On Grief. Crantor focuses on human suffering as unavoidable condition of man’s mortal life, and thus on the judgement regarding death. The notion of metriopatheia is seen as the synthesis of Crantor’s ethics, and logos as the most suitable tool in his view for avoiding the negative excesses of the passions. Crantor can claim to be the founder of the consolatory tradition, in which we find themes such as the consideration of grief as a doxa and nothing than a symptom of something that affects our philosophical beliefs, our values, and our fears, which can be healed by philosophy. Our two main sources for Crantor’s On Grief are Ps.Plutarch and Cicero. The former agrees with Crantor’s metriopatheia, while Cicero supports the Stoic ideal of apatheia, even though he professes to belong to the (Sceptical) Academy.