(Βίος and Αγωγή), a term introduced by Trevisanus of Bremen, in place of physiology, to signify the science of life.

BION of Smyrna, a bucolic poet, who flourished about the year B.C. 280. He was an admirable poet, according to the accounts of his disciple Moschus; and the few pieces of his which are extant tend to confirm that opinion. The latter years of his life were spent in Sicily, where he died by poison. The best editions of the poems of Bion, including those of Moschus, are by Fr. Jacobs, Gotha, 1795; Gilbert Wakefield, London, 1795; and that of J. F. Manso, Leipzig, 1807, which contains an elaborate dissertation on his life and poetry, and a German translation.

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 (Ding. Laert. iv.) Athenaeus (xiii. c. 293) states that his mother was a Lacedemonian courtezan 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.