Androcles (, 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 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 Africa. 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. There, he is condemned to be devoured by wild animals in the Circus Maximus in the presence of an emperor who is named in the account as Gaius Caesar, presumably Caligula. The most imposing of the beasts turns out to be the same lion, which again displays its affection toward Androclus. After questioning him, the emperor pardons the slave in recognition of this testimony to the power of friendship, and he is left in possession of the lion. Apion, who claimed to have been a spectator on this occasion, is then quoted as relating:
Afterwards we used to see Androclus with the lion attached to a slender leash, making the rounds of the tabernae throughout the city; Androclus was given money, the lion was sprinkled with flowers, and everyone who met them anywhere exclaimed, "This is the lion, a man's friend; this is the man, a lion's doctor".
The story was repeated a century later by Claudius Aelianus in his work On the Nature of Animals.
Later use
Later versions of the story, sometimes attributed to Aesop, began to appear from the mid-sixth century under the title "The Shepherd and the Lion". In Chrétien de Troyes' 12th-century romance, "Yvain, the Knight of the Lion", the knightly main character helps a lion that is attacked by a serpent. The lion then becomes his companion and helps him during his adventures. A century later, the story of taking a thorn from a lion's paw was related as an act of Saint Jerome in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (). Afterwards the lion joins him in the monastery and a different set of stories follows.
The later retelling, "Of the Remembrance of Benefits", in the Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans) of about 1330 in England, has a mediaeval setting and again makes the protagonist a knight. In the earliest English printed collection of Aesop's Fables by William Caxton, the tale appears as The lyon & the pastour or herdman and reverts to the story of a shepherd who cares for the wounded lion. He is later convicted of a crime and taken to Rome to be thrown to the wild beasts, only to be recognised and defended from the other animals by the one that he tended.
A Latin poem by Vincent Bourne dating from 1716–17 is based on the account of Aulus Gellius. Titled Mutua Benevolentia primaria lex naturae est, it was translated by William Cowper as "Reciprocal kindness: the primary law of nature".
George Bernard Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion (1912) makes Androcles a tailor; he is also given Christian beliefs for the purposes of the play, which on the whole takes a sceptical view of religion. The first film adaptation of the story in the US was also made in 1912. Afterwards there were several others for both cinema and TV. Rob Englehart's The Lion, the Slave and the Rodent (2010) was a much later American approach to the fable. A one-act chamber opera for five voices, it combined the story of Androcles with the fable of "The Lion and the Mouse".