Bion Smyrnaeus
The bucolic poet
b. fl. c. 100 BC
Bion of Phlossa near Smyrna was a Greek bucolic poet of the late second or early first century BC. Very little is known about his life. He appears to have worked in Sicily, in the tradition of Theocritus, and ancient sources suggest he was poisoned, though the details are unreliable.
His most famous work is the Epitaphius Adonis (Lament for Adonis), a poem of 98 lines on the death of Aphrodite's beloved. The poem is vivid, musical, and intensely sensuous — Aphrodite's grief is described with a physicality that borders on the erotic. The refrain structure and the interplay of beauty and death give it a ritualistic quality; it may reflect actual cult practices connected with the Adonia, the annual festival mourning Adonis.
Several fragments and the Epithalamium of Achilles and Deidameia also survive. Bion's influence on later pastoral poetry was considerable — Virgil knew his work, and the lament tradition he helped establish runs through Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais.
A lament for the death of Adonis. Aphrodite mourns her lover as nature itself weeps. The most beautiful of the Hellenistic pastoral poems after Theocr...
A short poem on the wedding of Achilles and Deidameia on Scyros.