Bion, Greek bucolic poet, was a native of Smyrna, or, rather, of a small place called Phlossa, on the River Meles, near Smyrna, and flourished about 100 BC.

The account formerly given of him, that he was the contemporary and imitator of Theocritus, the friend and tutor of Moschus, and lived about 280 BC, is now generally regarded as incorrect. W Stein (De Moschi et Bionis aetate, Tübingen, 1893) puts Bion, chiefly on metrical grounds, in the first half of the 1st century BC.

Nothing is known of him except that he lived in Sicily. The story that he died of poison, administered to him by some jealous rivals, who afterwards suffered the penalty of their crime, is probably only an invention. Although his poems are included in the general class of bucolic poetry, the remains show little of the vigour and truthfulness to nature characteristic of Theocritus. They breathe an exaggerated sentimentality, and show traces of the overstrained reflection frequently observable in later developments of pastoral poetry. The longest and best of them is the Lament for Adonis (Epitaphios Adonidos). It refers to the first day of the festival of Adonis, on which the death of the favourite of Aphrodite was lamented, thus forming an introduction to the Adoniazusae of Theocritus, the subject of which is the second day, when the reunion of Adonis and Aphrodite was celebrated. Fragments of his other pieces are preserved in Stobaeus; the epithalamium of Achilles and Deidameia is not his.

The subjects of Bion's poetry were the songs of shepherds and love songs; but we can now form only a partial judgment on the spirit and style of his poetry, on account of the fragmentary condition in which his works have come down to us. Some of his idylls are extant entire, but of others we have only fragments. Their style is very refined ; the sentiments are soft and sentimental ; and his versification, which is exclusively the hexameter, is very fluent and elegant. In the selection and management of his subjects he is superior to Moschus ; but in strength and depth of feeling, and in the truthfulness of his sentiments, he is much inferior to Theocritus. This is particularly visible in Epitaphios Adonidos. He is usually reckoned among the bucolic poets ; but it must be remembered that this name is not confined to the subjects it really indicates ; for, in the time of Bion, bucolic poetry also embraced that class of poems in which the legends about gods and heroes were treated from an erotic point of view. The dialect of Bion is, like that of Theocritus, a mixed Doric.

Bion and Moschus have been edited separately by G Hermann (1849) and C Ziegler (Tübingen, 1869), the Epitaphios Adonidos by HL Ahrens (1854) and E Hiller in Beitrage zur Textegeschichte der griechischen Bukoliker (1888). Bion's poems are generally included in the editions of Theocritus. There are English translations by J Banks (1853) in Bohn's Classical Library, and by Andrew Long (1889), with Theocritus and Moschus; there is an edition of the text by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in the Oxford Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca (1905). On the date of Bion see Franz Bücheler in Rheinisches Museum, xxx. (1875), pp. 33-411 also G Knaack in Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyclopädie, s.v.; and F Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexandrinerzeit, i. (1891), p. 233.

This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.