1. Bion the Borysthenite (c.325–c.246 BC), Greek popular philosopher, born in the Greek colony of Olbia in Scythia, near the estuary of the river Borysthenes (Dnieper). His family was enslaved to a rhetorician but Bion received a good education and was eventually freed. He studied in the various philosophical schools in Athens but became an adherent of no one school. He seemed closest to the Cynics whose caustic wit and anti-establishment attitudes he shared. Most of his life he spent wandering from city to city, lecturing and teaching for money. He popularized the Greek diatribē (‘spoken address’) as a written sermon, so that it could reach a wider audience; and the connotation of abusiveness which the word has acquired in modern times derives from Bion's humorous but sharp attacks on human faults and weaknesses. His influence on the Latin satires of Lucilius and Horace was notable. Fairly extensive fragments of his writing survive.
2. Of Smyrna, the last Greek pastoral poet known to us by name; he lived at the end of the second century BC, and is generally linked with the pastoral poet Moschus. Virtually nothing is known of his life; according to the anonymous Lament for Bion (attributed to Moschus), he lived in Sicily and died by poisoning. He wrote in hexameters in the (literary) Doric dialect, and seventeen fragments of his poems (some may even be complete) survive. Since the Renaissance he has been credited with the Lament for Adonis, perhaps intended for recitation at a festival. The pastoral element in his work is slight, most of the poems being playfully erotic.
