Lions in Ancient Greece
The ancient Greeks told stories about lions, carved them in stone, painted them on pots, and maybe even met a few!
In 480 BCE, the Persian king Xerxes marched his enormous army through northern Greece. At night, something crept out of the shadows and attacked the camels carrying the army's supplies. It wasn't thieves or enemy soldiers, it was lions! The historian Herodotus wrote that they left every other animal and person alone and went only for the camels, which baffled him.
Lions in Greece? Isn't that an African animal? For a long time, historians weren't sure whether to believe Herodotus. Some thought he'd picked up a tall tale from the locals, but he gave very precise details about where the lions lived. He said they were found only between two rivers, the Nestus in the northeast and the Achelous in the west, and nowhere else in Europe. That's a big patch of northern and central Greece! Over the years, evidence has kept piling up, including real lion bones dug up in Greece from the Late Neolithic to the Iron Age. These would have been close cousins of the Asiatic lion, one that survives today in India. Now, scholars count lions as part of ancient Greece's wild animals, just like foxes and wolves.
The lions were running out of time though. About 150 years after Herodotus, the philosopher Aristotle described almost exactly the same area, but the "many lions" had turned into "few". He also noted that lions were rare, that their cubs are tiny when they're born, and that lions have manes but lionesses don't. Not everything he wrote was correct though, for example he claimed that lions only shed four teeth and the cubs can barely walk at two months old In reality, lion cubs grow a full set of baby teeth which are replaced by their adult teeth as they get older, and can walk from two to three weeks old and run by around a month old.
By the 1st century CE, a Greek writer named Dio Chrysostom said lions were already extinct in Europe. Why were the lions disappearing? We don't know exactly, but it's suspected that it was because of humans hunting them. Often lions were hunted for sport, prestige, and capture for use in amphitheaters and gladiator games.
Even as real lions disappeared, Greek lion stories and art grew. Where did the Greeks get their ideas? Many scholars think they borrowed lion pictures from older civilisations to the east. In the ancient Near East, lions had stood for strength and royalty for ages, but one researcher points out that some Bronze Age artists around the Aegean Sea drew attacking lions so realistically that nothing in Egypt or the Near East matches them...perhaps they'd seen the real thing!
Lions meant a lot to the Greeks:
Bravery: In Homer's Iliad, lions are mentioned about forty times. One time is after Menelaus kills the Trojan Euphorbus in Book 17 and strips his armour, he is said to be like a mountain lion that snatches the best cow from a grazing herd.
Monsters: The hero Heracles had to defeat the Nemean lion, and his arrows just bounced off it! So he trapped it in its own cave and strangled it, then skinned it with the lion's own claws since nothing else was sharp enough. He wore the pelt as a cloak. Greek artists loved this scene, and a hero in a lion-skin was one of the most popular things to paint in Athens.
Guards: The Greeks saw lions as guardians, so pictures of lions often decorated tombs to protect the people buried there. At the ancient city of Mycenae, two stone lions stand guard above the Lion Gate, built around 1250 BCE. On the sacred island of Delos, up to 16 snarling marble lions lined the path to an important sanctuary (sources disagree on the details as some say there were nine to twelve, given by the people of Naxos shortly before 600 BCE).
Stories: In the fables of Aesop, the lion is the king of the beasts, and bit of a bully. After a hunt, he takes the biggest shares just because he's the strongest which is where we get the saying "the lion's share."
Think About It
Lions on tombs and gates were meant to guard things. If you could pick any animal to guard your bedroom door, which would you choose and why?
Aristotle got a few lion facts wrong. Why do you think people in the past sometimes got things wrong about animals? How could you check if something you read is true?
By about 2000 years ago, lions had vanished from Europe. What do you think can make an animal disappear from a place? What can people do to protect animals today?
Until next time,
λεῖος πλόος!
Written by Eleanor-Scarlett Russell
Education and Programs Officer
Hellenic Museum
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