“Always have in mind this sentiment, Expect not from your friends what you can do yourself.”

ANDROCLES AND THE LION

Attic Nights

Aulus Gellius

Translated by the Rev. W. Beloe, 1795

The ‘Appion’ described as the earlier teller of this tale was Apion, an Egypt-born Greek writer of the first century AD. The story of Androclus – or ‘Androcles’ – and the lion is also found in Aesop and has been retold many times. It inspired, among others, George Bernard Shaw’s play of 1912, in which Androcles is explicitly characterised as a Christian undergoing punishment for his faith.

Appion, who was called Plistonices, was a man of great and various learning, and had also very extensive knowledge of Greek. His books are said to have had considerable reputation, in which almost every thing is to be found that is most extraordinary in the history of Aegypt. But in those things, which he affirms that he either heard or read himself, from a reprehensible desire of ostentation, he is somewhat too talkative, being indeed, as to the propagation of his own doctrines, a boaster. But what follows, as it is written in his fifth book of Aegyptian Things, he does not affirm that he either heard or read, but saw with his own eyes in the city of Rome.