Bion of Borysthenes - Life

Life

Bion was from the town of Olbia on the north coast of the Black Sea by the mouth of the river Borysthenes (modern-day Dnieper). He lived c. 325-c. 250 BC, but the exact dates of his birth and death are uncertain. Strabo mentions him as a contemporary of Eratosthenes, who was born 275 BC. Diogenes Laërtius has preserved an account in which Bion describes his parentage to Antigonus II Gonatas, King of Macedonia. His father was a freedman and a dealer in salt fish, with which he combined the occupation of smuggling. His mother, Olympia, was a Lacedaemonian prostitute. 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 studying under Xenocrates and Crates of Athens, then he became a Cynic, (perhaps under Crates of Thebes), afterwards he attached to Theodorus, the Cyrenaic philosopher whose alleged atheism is supposed to have influenced Bion, and finally he became a pupil of Theophrastus the Peripatetic. 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 II Gonatas. He subsequently taught philosophy at Rhodes, and died at Chalcis in Euboea.