Crates of Mallus

Crates of Mallos (* probably in Mallos; † 145 BC) was a philosopher from a city in Cilicia, and one of the most respected Greek grammarian of the 2nd century BC He was the representative of Stoicism and founded his own school in Pergamon that stood to the Alexandrian Aristarchus with a basic contrast both in terms of grammatical conception of language as well as in the interpretation of Homer.

Life and work

To 167 BC (different sources give 169 or 170 on ) Crates went as an envoy of King Attalos II of Pergamon to Rome, where he gave lectures, which gave the first impetus to grammatical studies in Rome. He probably died around 145

Of his numerous writings, of which an extensive critical exegesis of Homer was probably the main work, only the title and meager fragments survive.

Kratetisches worldview

Crates also dealt with the spherical shape of the earth. His thesis of a four-division world shaped the ancient and Western imagination to the late Middle Ages. Accordingly, the earth is divided into five climatic zones, of which the two polar regions too cold, the equatorial zone are too hot for people. Habitable are only two temperate zones. The four continents resulting from the intersecting at right angles to the world's oceans, one of which extends around the equator, the other as Meridian connects the poles.

The known part of the world (Asia, Africa and Europe ) denotes Crates as ecumenism and eventually across the Atlantic to reach continent as Periökumene. The unattainable because of the equatorial heat belt parts of the world are the Antökumene and Antichthonenkontinent. Crates also realized that the seasons have to be in the southern hemisphere which opposes the Northern Hemisphere.

According to Roman sources Crates should have built around 150 BC, the first globe.