(), a Scythian philosopher, surnamed BORYSTHENITES,
from the town of Oczacovia, Olbia, or Borysthenes, near the mouth of the Dnieper, lived about
THEODORUS], the philosopher who carried out the Cyrenaic doctrines into
the atheistic results which were their natural fruit [ARISTIPPUS],
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. 2.2. 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 Tusc. 3.26), 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. p. 591f. 592, a.)