Bion, Traite des instrumens de mathematique; also L' Usage des globes celestes; Sedillot, Memoire sur les instrumens; J.
Bion (Poet) >>
For nearly three years, however, he was enabled to study and to experiment in verse without any active pressure or interruption from his family - three precious years in which the first phase of his art as a writer of idylls and bucolics, imitated to a large extent from Theocritus, Bion and the Greek anthologists, was elaborated.
BION, of Borysthenes (Olbia), in Sarmatia, Greek moralist and philosopher, flourished in the first half of the 3rd century B.C. He was of low origin, his mother being a courtesan and his father a dealer in salt fish, with which he combined the occupation of smuggling.
Bion, when a young man, was sold as a slave to a rhetorician, who gave him his freedom and made him his heir.
After the death of his patron, Bion went to Athens to study philosophy.
One of his teachers was the Cyrenaic Theodorus, called "the atheist," whose influence is clearly shown in Bion's attitude towards the gods.
After the manner of the sophists of the period, Bion travelled through Greece and Macedonia, and was admitted to the literary circle at the court of Antigonus Gonatas.
Bion was essentially a popular writer, and in his Diatribae he satirized the follies of mankind in a manner calculated to appeal to the sympathies of a low-class audience.
So is that of his successors, both the Syracusan Moschus and Bion of Smyrna, who came to Sicily as to his natural school.
33-60, and the spurious epitaph on Bion may have been one of the Dirges.
A vivid description of the festival at Alexandria (for which Bion probably wrote his Dirge of Adonis) is given by Theocritus in his fifteenth idyll, the Adoniazusae.
His translation of Anacreon (1791) obtained him a post in the royal library in 1795, and in1796-1797he published paraphrases from Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, Sappho and Meleager.
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