Androcles and the Lion
legendary figure in Aesop, with lion
Androcles (Greek: Ἀνδροκλῆς, alternatively spelled Androclus in Latin) is the main character of a common folk tale about a man befriending a lion.
The tale is included in the Aarne–Thompson classification system as type 156. The story reappeared in the Middle Ages as "The Shepherd and the Lion" and was then ascribed to Aesop's Fables. It is numbered 563 in the Perry Index and can be compared to Aesop's The Lion and the Mouse in both its general trend and in its moral of the reciprocal nature of mercy.
Classical tale
The earliest surviving account of the Androcles episode is found in Aulus Gellius's 2nd century Attic Nights. The author relates there a story told by Apion in his lost work Aegyptiaca/Αἰγυπτιακά (Wonders of Egypt), the events of which Apion claimed to have personally witnessed in Rome. In this version, Androclus (going by the Latin variation of the name) is a runaway slave of a former Roman consul administering a part of Rome. He takes shelter in a cave, which turns out to be the den of a wounded lion, from whose paw he removes a large thorn. In gratitude, the lion becomes tame towards him and henceforward shares his catch with the slave.
After three years, Androclus craves a return to civilization but is soon imprisoned as a fugitive slave and sent to Rome.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Androcles and the Lion” is legendary figure in Aesop, with lion. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Androcles, Lion and legendary, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q512602. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Androcles and the Lion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.