quite ready to attack everyone and everything. He was essentially a popular writer, and in his Diatribes he satirized the foolishness of people. While eulogizing poverty and philosophy, he attacked the gods, musicians, geometricians, astrologers, and the wealthy, and denied the efficacy of prayer. Laërtius claims Bion was an atheist (which he renounced at the time of his death) but the surviving fragments reveal only a religious skepticism concerning mystery religions, oracles, etc. The quotations of Bion recorded by Teles, and preserved by Stobaeus reveal a man who "treats of ordinary human problems in a common-sense spirit, though for emphasis employing all the devices of contemporary prose style. ... The situations dealt with are those that may confront any person, from the universalia of old age, poverty, exile, slavery, the fear of death, down to the more particular case of a nagging wife." His influence is distinctly traceable in succeeding writers, e.g. in the satires of Menippus. Horace alludes to his satires and caustic wit. Examples of this wit are his sayings: "The miser did not possess wealth, but was possessed by it." "Impiety was the companion of credulity, [and] avarice the metropolis of vice." "Good slaves are really free, and bad freemen really slaves." One saying is preserved by Cicero: "It is useless to tear our hair when we are in grief, since sorrow is not cured by baldness." Another is cited by Plutarch: "Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest." Notes References Further reading Kindstrand, Jan, (1976) Bion of Borysthenes: A Collection of the Fragments with Introduction and Commentary. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. External links 4th-century BC births 3rd-century BC deaths 3rd-century BC philosophers Ancient Greek writers Ancient Greek slaves and freedmen Ancient Pontic Greeks Cynic philosophers Hellenistic-era philosophers in Athens