BION, Greek bucolic poet, was born at Phlossa, near Smyrna, and flourished somewhere about I oo B.C. Nothing is known of him, except that he probably lived in Sicily. The story that he died of poison is probably only an invention of the author of the Epita phios Bionos (see MoscHus) . Although his poems are called Bucolics the remains show little of the vigour and truthfulness to nature characteristic of Theocritus. They are over-sentimental, and show the overstrained reflection which characterizes late pastoral poetry. The longest and best of them is the Lament for Adonis CRT cr64uos 'A&(.i 5os) which refers to the first day of the festival, when the death of Adonis was lamented. Fragments of his other pieces are preserved in Stobaeus; the epithalamium of Achilles and Deidameia is not his.
Bion and Moschus have been edited separately by G. Hermann (5849) and C. Ziegler (Tubingen, 5869), the Epitaphios Adonidos by H. L. Ahrens (i854) and E. Hiller in Beitrdge zur Textegeschichte der griechischen Bukoliker (1888). Bion's poems are generally included in the editions of Theocritus. English transl.: J. Banks (1853) in Bohn's Classical Library; Andrew Lang (5889), with Theocritus and Moschus (prose) ; A. S. Way (1913) (verse) ; edition by U. Wilamowitz Mollendorff in the Oxford Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca (19o5). On the date of Bion see F. Bucheler in Rheinisches Museum, xxx. PP. (1875) ; W. Stein, De Moschi et Bionis Aetate (Tubingen, 1893) ; also G. Knaack in Pauly-Wissowa's Realencyklopddie, s.v.; and F. Susemihl, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur in der Alex andrinerzeit, i., p. 233 (1891) .