(275 B.C.)
Of Bion, the second of the Sicilian idyllists, of whom Theocritus was
the first and Moschus the third and last, but little knowledge and few
remains exist. He was born near Smyrna, says Suidas; and from the elegy
on his death, attributed to his pupil Moschus, we infer that he lived in
Sicily and died there of poison. "Say that Bion the herdsman is dead,"
says the threnody, appealing to the Sicilian muses, "and that song has
died with Bion, and the Dorian minstrelsy hath perished.... Poison came,
Bion, to thy mouth. What mortal so cruel as to mix poison for thee!" As
Theocritus is also mentioned in the idyl, Bion is supposed to have been
his contemporary, and to have flourished about 275 B. C.
Compared with Theocritus, his poetry is inferior in simplicity and
naïveté, and declines from the type which Theocritus had established for
the out-door, open-field idyl. With Bion, bucolics first took on the air
of the study. Although at first this art and affectation were rarely
discernible, they finally led to the mold of brass in which for
centuries Italian and English pastorals were cast, and later to the
complete devitalizing which marks English pastoral poetry in the
eighteenth century, with the one exception of Allan Ramsay's "Gentle
Shepherd". Theocritus had sung with genuine feeling of trees and
wandering winds, of flowers and the swift mountain stream. His poetry
has atmosphere; it is vital with sunlight, color, and the beauty which
is cool and calm and true. Although Bion's poems possess elegance and
sweetness, and abound in pleasing imagery, they lack the naturalness of
the idyls of Theocritus. Reflection has crept into them; they are in
fact love-songs, with here and there a tinge of philosophy,
The most famous as well as the most powerful and original of Bion's
poems remaining to us is the threnody upon Adonis. It was doubtless
composed in honor of the rites with which Greek women celebrated certain
Eastern festivals; for the worship of Adonis still lingered among them,
mixed with certain Syrian customs.
"Thammuz came next behind,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer's day,
While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded."
Thammuz is identified with Adonis. "We came to a fair large river,"
writes an old English traveler, "doubtless the ancient river Adonis,
which at certain seasons of the year, especially about the feast of
Adonis, is of a bloody color, which the heathens looked upon as
proceeding from a kind of sympathy in the river for the death of Adonis,
who was killed by a wild boar in the mountains out of which the stream
issues. Something like this we saw actually come to pass; for the water
was stained to a surprising redness, and, as we observed in traveling,
had discolored the sea a great way into a reddish hue, occasioned
doubtless by a sort of minium, or red earth, washed into the river by
the violence of the rain."
The poem is colored by the Eastern nature of its subject, and its
rapidity, vehemence, warmth, and unrestraint are greater than the strict
canon of Greek art allows. It is noteworthy, aside from its varied
beauties, because of its fine abandonment to grief and its appeal for
recognition of the merits of the dead youth it celebrates. Bion's
threnody has undoubtedly become a criterion and given the form to some
of the more famous "songs of tears". The laudatory clegy of Moschus for
his master--we say of Moschus, although Ahrens, in his recension,
includes the lament under 'Incertorum Idyllia' at the end of 'Moschi
Reliquiæ'--follows it faithfully. Milton in his great ode of 'Lycidas'
does not depart from the Greek lines; and Shelley, lamenting Keats in
his 'Adonaïs,' reverts still more closely to the first master, adding
perhaps an element of artificiality one does not find in other
threnodies. The broken and extended form of Tennyson's celebration of
Arthur Hallam takes it out of a comparison with the Greek; but the
monody of 'Thyrsis', Matthew Arnold's commemoration of Clough,
approaches nearer the Greek. Yet no other lament has the energy and
rapidity of Bion's; the refrain, the insistent repetition of the words
"I wail for Adonis",--"Alas for Cypris!" full of pathos and unspoken
irrepressible woe, is used only by his pupil Moschus, though hinted at
by Milton.
The peculiar rhythm, the passion and delicate finish of the song, have
attracted a number of translators, among whose versions Mrs. Browning's
'The Lament for Adonis' is considered the best. The subjoined version in
the Spenserian stanza, by Anna C. Brackett, follows its model closely in
its directness and fervor of expression, and has moreover in itself
genuine poetic merit. The translation of a fragment of 'Hesperos' is
that of J.A. Symonds. Bion's fluent and elegant versification invites
study, and his few idyls and fragments have at various times been turned
into English by Fawkes (to be found in Chalmers's 'Works of English
Poets'), Polwhele, Banks, Chapman, and others.