Crates of Mallus
Crates of Mallus (fl. 2nd century BCE), born in Cilicia and brought up at Tarsus, moved to Pergamon in Asia Minor, where he founded the eponymous school of grammar and may have helped Eumenes II organise the library.
Crates also served as an ambassador to Rome, where he was forced to extend his stay after falling into the Cloaca Maxima and breaking his leg. Still, the accident allowed him to introduce Romans to his notions of grammar (applying the rules of language to clarify the meaning of literature) and criticism (the investigation of everything which could illuminate it).
Apart from his nine-volume commentary on the Iliad and Odyssey, he wrote commentaries on various ancient authors and works on dialects, geography, natural history and agriculture. However, only a few fragments have survived. He is credited with constructing the earliest known representation of the Earth as a globe: "whoever would represent the real earth as near as possible by artificial means, should make a globe like that of Crates." (The Geography of Strabo, II, v, 10.)
Biographical Sketches: Crates of Mallus booklet
