Androcles and The Lion - Later Use

Later Use

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 (c.1260). 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.

George Bernard Shaw's play Androcles and the Lion (1912) makes Androcles a tailor and so keeps him as part of the underclass; he is also given Christian beliefs for the purposes of the play, which on the whole takes a skeptical view of religion. 1912 was also the date of the first film adaptation of the story in the USA. Afterwards there were several others for both cinema and TV.