| May 25, 2013 |
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| Biographies
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|  OLVIA (Ancient city) SARMATIA |
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Bion, 325-255 B.C.
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Bion, a Scythian philosopher, surnamed Borysthenites, from the town of Oczacovia,
Olbia, or Borysthenes, near the mouth of the Dnieper, lived about B. C. 250, but
the exact dates of his birth and death are uncertain. Strabo (i.) mentions him
as a contemporary of Eratosthenes, who was born B. C. 275. Laertius (iv. 46, &c.)
has preserved an account which Bion himself gave of his parentage to Antigonus
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
lie embraced the tenets of almost every sect in succession. First he was an Academic
and a disciple of Crates, then a Cynic, afterwards 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 Laertius : 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, as he does when he speaks of persons
delighting Bioneis scrmonibus et sale nigro. (Epist. ii. 2. 60.) 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 (Tusc. iii. 26), 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. We learn his mother's name and country from Athenaeus (xiii., f. 592,
a.)
| This text is from: A dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, 1873 (ed. William Smith). Cited Sep 2005 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks |
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