BION, surnamed Borysthenites, a Scythian philosopher, born at Borysthenes. He flourished about B.C. 250, and resided for some time at the court of Antigonus Gonatas, king of Macedonia. He was the son of a freedman, and while young was sold as a slave to a rhetorician, who adopted him as his heir (Diog. Laert. iv.) Athenaeus (xiii. c. 293) states that his mother was a Lacedaemonian courtesan named Olympia. He studied at Athens, where he became first an academic and a disciple of Crates, and then a Cynic; and after embracing the tenets of Theodorus the atheist, he finally became a pupil of Theophrastus the peripatetic. Bion was possessed of much natural acuteness; but his habits of life were grossly profligate. The keenness of his satire is alluded to by Horace, Epist. ii. 2. 60.