Page:The Greek bucolic poets (1912).djvu/27

Rh upon his death written by a pupil who was a native of Magna Graecia. The third of the Bucolic poets, as he was apparently reckoned in antiquity, was born at a little place called Phlossa near Smyrna. His pupil calls his poetry Dorian and connects him with Syracuse and the Muses of Sicily. But this may be no more biographical than his phrase “Bion the neatherd.” According to his pupil he was the leading Bucolic poet of his day, and it is unfortunate that most of the poems that have come down to us under his name, though all quoted as extracts from his Bucolica, are really not pastorals at all. It is note-worthy that Diogenes calls him μελικὸς ποιητής, a lyric poet. The description lyric poems would apply —in Alexandrian times— to the Adonis and perhaps to some of the smaller poems too. Either Diogenes knew the collection by the title of μέλη βουκολικά, or there were two collections of which he knew only one.

If we may take his pupil literally, Bion was murdered by means of poison. There is really nothing to settle his date. Suidas’ order, Theocritus, Moschus, Bion, is probably to be regarded as chronological, and a comparison of the styles of the two last poets points to Bion having been the later. In the present state of our knowledge it would be unwise to draw a contrary conclusion from the omission of Moschus' name from the autobiographical passage of the Lament. Rh