Bion of Borysthenes

Bion (Greek: Βίων), a Scythian philosopher, surnamed Borysthenites, from the town of Olbia, or Borysthenes, near the mouth of the Dnieper, lived about c. 325-c. 250 BC, but the exact dates of his birth and death are uncertain. Strabo^[1] mentions him as a contemporary of Eratosthenes, who was born 275 BC. Diogenes Laërtius^[2] has preserved an account which Bion himself told of his parentage to Antigonus II Gonatas, King of Macedonia. His father was a freedman, and his mother, Olympia, a Lacedaemonian harlot, and the whole family were sold as slaves, on account of some offence committed by the father. In consequence of this, Bion fell into the hands of a rhetorician, who made him his heir. Having burnt his patron's library, he went to Athens, and applied himself to philosophy, in the course of which study he embraced the tenets of almost every sect in succession. First he was an Academic and a disciple of Xenocrates, then he became a Cynic, (possibly under Crates), afterwards he attached to Theodorus, the philosopher who carried out the Cyrenaic doctrines into the atheistic results which were their natural fruit, and finally he became a pupil of Theophrastus, the Peripatetic. He seems to have been a man of considerable intellectual acuteness, but utterly profligate, and a notorious unbeliever in the existence of God. His habits of life were indeed avowedly infamous, so much so, that he spoke with contempt of Socrates for abstaining from crime. Many of Bion's dogmas and sharp sayings are preserved by Laërtius: they are generally trite pieces of morality put in a somewhat pointed shape, though hardly brilliant enough to justify Horace in holding him up as the type of keen satire. Examples of this wit are his sayings, that "the miser did not possess wealth, but was possessed by it," that "impiety was the companion of credulity," "avarice the metropolis of vice," that "good slaves are really free, and bad freemen really slaves," with many others of the same kind. One is preserved by Cicero,^[3] viz. that "it is useless to tear our hair when we are in grief, since sorrow is not cured by baldness." he died at Chalcis in Euboea.

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This article incorporates text from the public domain Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1867).

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