For nearly three years, however, he was enabled to study and to experiment in verse without any active pressure or interruption from his family - three precious years in which the first phase of his art as a writer of idylls and bucolics, imitated to a large extent from Theocritus, Bion and the Greek anthologists, was elaborated.
Bion, when a young man, was sold as a slave to a rhetorician, who gave him his freedom and made him his heir.
After the death of his patron, Bion went to Athens to study philosophy.
One of his teachers was the Cyrenaic Theodorus, called "the atheist," whose influence is clearly shown in Bion's attitude towards the gods.
After the manner of the sophists of the period, Bion travelled through Greece and Macedonia, and was admitted to the literary circle at the court of Antigonus Gonatas.