Other editions of book Androcles and the Lion

Androcles is the main character of a common folktale that 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. 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 skeptical 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".

Androcles, a fugitive Christian tailor, accompanied by his nagging wife, is on the run from his Roman persecutors. While hiding in the forest he comes upon a wild lion who approaches him with a wounded paw. His wife runs off. Androcles sees that the cause of the animal's distress is a large thorn embedded in its paw, which he draws out while soothing the lion in baby language.

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