Bion of Borysthenes c. 325 BC – c. 250 BC

Bion of Borysthenes was a Greek philosopher of the third century BC, the son of a freedman and a courtesan, who reinvented the ancient diatribe as a vehicle of moral instruction. Born on the Black Sea coast and educated successively in the Academy, the Cyrenaic school, the Cynic tradition, and the Peripatetic, he traveled across the Greek world as an itinerant lecturer, mocking the pretensions of courtiers, philosophers, and ordinary men alike. The fragments of his diatribes, preserved largely by Stobaeus and Diogenes Laertius, exerted a profound influence on Horace, Seneca, and the long tradition of philosophical satire.

Bion of Borysthenes was born around 325 BC at Olbia on the north shore of the Black Sea, the son of a freed salt-fish dealer and a courtesan. According to his own account preserved by Diogenes Laertius, the family was sold into slavery for tax fraud; Bion was bought, freed, and made his heir by a rhetorician, then made his way to Athens, where he studied successively in the Academy under Crates, with the atheist Cyrenaic Theodorus, with the Peripatetic Theophrastus, and finally as a Cynic. He spent the rest of his life as an itinerant lecturer in Greece and at the court of Antigonus Gonatas in Macedonia.

He wrote nothing of great length and his works are lost; fragments survive in the long life devoted to him by Diogenes Laertius, in Plutarch, Stobaeus, and Teles. He is credited with the invention, or at least the popularisation, of the diatribe — the short, witty, hard-hitting sermon on moral commonplaces — and with a vivid satirical style that Horace named as one of his own models.

Bion's surviving aphorisms attack the love of money, the fear of death, the misery of old age, and the vanity of ambition in roughly Cynic terms but without ascetic extravagance, mixing harsh moral diagnosis with low and homely imagery. His lectures shaped the popular philosophy of the Hellenistic age and, through Teles and the Roman satirists, the long European tradition of the moral diatribe. He is presumed to have died around the middle of the third century BC.