Androcles and the Lion

Part One · The Cave in the Desert

Long ago, when the Roman Empire stretched across the coastline of northern Africa, a man named Androcles labored as a servant in the household of a Roman governor, an official whose temper was notorious throughout the province. The governor treated his servants with relentless severity, punishing the smallest mistakes with extraordinary cruelty. Androcles, who was gentle and patient by nature, eventually decided that he could endure such treatment no longer. One moonless night he slipped out through the servants' gate, crept past the sleeping guards, and fled southward into the desert. He preferred the uncertain dangers of the wilderness to the certain misery of remaining in that house. He carried nothing except a cloak, a flask of water and an enormous, trembling hope.

The desert, however, proved considerably more merciless than he had anticipated. By midday the sun was blazing with ferocious intensity, the sand scorched his feet through his thin sandals, and his water was exhausted long before evening. Androcles wandered across the endless dunes, increasingly desperate, until he noticed a cave hollowed into the side of a rocky hill, its entrance shadowed and inviting. Grateful beyond words, he stumbled inside, collapsed against the cool stone wall, and immediately fell into an exhausted sleep. He never considered for a single moment who the ordinary occupant of such a comfortable cave might be. The cave smelled of dry grass and of something wild and unfamiliar, but he was far too exhausted to investigate.

He was awakened at sunset by a tremendous roar that echoed through the cave like rolling thunder. Androcles opened his eyes and discovered an enormous lion standing in the entrance, silhouetted against the crimson sky, its magnificent mane glowing like a crown of fire. Paralyzed with terror, he pressed himself against the wall and waited for the end. But the lion did not spring. Instead, it limped toward him slowly and awkwardly, holding up one front paw, and the roar, he now understood, was not a sound of fury but of suffering. The great animal lowered itself to the ground in front of him, groaning pitifully. Then it extended its paw toward him, as if it were requesting assistance from a physician.

Androcles hesitated, his heart hammering, and then, summoning every particle of his courage, he knelt and examined the paw. It was horribly swollen, and deep within the soft pad he discovered an enormous thorn, which had obviously been festering there for days. Speaking soothingly, the way he might have comforted a frightened child, he grasped the thorn firmly and extracted it with one decisive pull. The lion flinched and growled, but it did not attack him. Androcles cleaned the wound with the last drops of moisture from a desert plant and bound it with a strip torn from his cloak. Then the lion, with an expression of unmistakable relief, laid its enormous head in his lap and fell peacefully asleep.

Part Two · The Arena

From that evening onward, Androcles and the lion lived together in the cave, as companions rather than as master and beast. Every day the lion went hunting and returned with the choicest portions of its catch, which it deposited respectfully at the feet of its friend. Androcles roasted his share over a small fire of desert brushwood. For three years they shared the cave, the sunrises and the long silent evenings, and Androcles gradually forgot his fear of the wilderness. Yet eventually he grew homesick for human voices and human company. One morning, while the lion was away hunting, he left the cave and walked back toward the towns of the coast, hoping that the governor had long since forgotten him.

The governor had forgotten nothing. Within a week, Androcles was recognized by a soldier, arrested and shipped across the sea to Rome in chains, where the law prescribed a dreadful punishment for runaway servants. He was condemned to face a wild animal in the arena of the Circus Maximus, before the emperor himself and an audience of many thousands, as part of the public spectacles that the Romans considered entertainment. Androcles waited in a dark cell beneath the arena, listening to the distant roaring of the crowd above him. He reflected with bitter amusement that he had once lived for three peaceful years beside a lion, only to be delivered to another one at last. He thought often of his old friend in the cave. He wondered whether the lion missed him, too.

On the appointed day, the guards led him out onto the sand of the arena, which glittered in the sunshine beneath a sea of curious faces. The emperor sat in his elevated box, surrounded by senators in white togas, and the spectators murmured with anticipation. Then a gate creaked open on the opposite side. An immense lion came bounding into the arena with a roar that shook the benches. It had been captured recently in the African desert and kept hungry for the occasion. The crowd shrieked with excitement. Androcles stood motionless in the center of the arena, his hands empty, and he closed his eyes, because he had no weapon and no desire to watch his own destruction. The sand was hot under his feet. The roar came closer.

The lion charged across the sand at tremendous speed, its mane streaming behind it, and the spectators rose to their feet in a single breathless wave. Then, only a few paces from Androcles, the lion stopped abruptly, as if it had collided with an invisible wall. It lifted its head, sniffed the air uncertainly, and approached him slowly, almost cautiously. Androcles, astonished that he was still alive, opened his eyes. The lion was circling him, examining him from every side. Then, to the absolute amazement of the entire audience, it lay down at his feet, rolled onto its back like an affectionate puppy, and began to lick his hands with its enormous rough tongue. A strange hush fell over the stadium.

Part Three · The Reward

Androcles stared down at the great tawny animal, and then he noticed an old scar across the pad of its front paw, exactly where he had removed the thorn so long ago, in the shadowy cave beneath the desert hill. It was his companion from the desert cave, captured by the emperor's hunters and transported to Rome in the same season as himself. Weeping with joy, Androcles knelt and embraced the lion around its neck, and the lion rumbled contentedly, like an immense cat beside a fireplace. A deafening uproar exploded throughout the stadium. Nobody in Rome had ever witnessed anything comparable, and thousands of spectators were shouting simultaneously, demanding an explanation for this extraordinary and inexplicable reconciliation. Even the guards forgot their duties and stared.

The emperor, as bewildered as anyone, commanded that the prisoner be brought before him, and Androcles, escorted by the lion, which refused to leave his side, approached the imperial box and bowed. In a clear voice that carried across the silent arena, he narrated his entire history: the cruel governor, his desperate escape, the cave, the thorn, and the three years of companionship in the wilderness. As he spoke, the story was repeated from row to row, until every spectator in the stadium had heard it. When he finished, there was a moment of profound silence. Then the audience erupted again, but this time the thousands of voices were shouting for mercy and for freedom. "Let him go!" they cried. "Set them both free!"

The emperor considered the situation thoughtfully. He understood that the crowd would never forgive him if he ignored their passionate demands, and he was also genuinely moved by the remarkable loyalty of the animal. So he rose to his feet and announced his decision. Androcles was pardoned completely and granted his liberty, and the lion was presented to him as a gift, to belong to him for the remainder of its life. The applause was so tremendous that people afterward claimed it had been heard on the far side of the river. Androcles bowed once more to the emperor, rested his hand affectionately on the lion's mane, and walked out of the arena through the gate by which the lion had entered it.

For many years afterward, the citizens of Rome grew accustomed to an unusual sight in their streets. Androcles would stroll through the city with the lion walking calmly beside him on a light leash, and people would scatter flowers in their path and press coins into his hand. They would say to one another, "There goes the lion who was a man's host, and the man who was a lion's physician." Children followed them from street to street, and merchants offered the lion the finest meat in their shops. The story was told and retold for centuries, and its meaning remained the same in every version. Kindness offered freely, even to a frightening stranger, is never entirely wasted, and gratitude can survive across years, across oceans and even across the boundary between a human being and a beast.