The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

speaking of the style of Classical lions in sculpture as “distilled from generations of using
motifs from Syria and Mesopotamia.”
Literary Evidence for the Availability of Lions in Classical Greece
Turning next to Vermeule’s assertion that Classical Greek sculptors contemplated
large dogs and precocious cats owing to the absence of real lions—an idea that, in his
mind, accounts for the non-naturalistic elements in the statues of lions—it appears to
overlook ancient literary evidence that attests to the presence of lions in fifth- and fourth-
century northern Greece. Starting in the fifth century, Herodotus, for example, refers to
lions attacking the camel train of Xerxes’ invading army as it was making its way
through northern Greece in 480 B.C., while maintaining that lions were still present in
that area in his own day (later part of the fifth century):
As Xerxes marched along, lions set upon his camels, which were carrying the
corn. The lions would come constantly at night, and leaving their usual haunts,
would touch nothing else, baggage animal or human; they ravaged the camels
only. I wonder what the cause can be that forced the lions to leave the other
creatures alone and attack the camels, since this was an animal that they had never
seen before or had any experience of.
There are in these parts many lions and wild oxen, the enormous horns of which
are brought to Greece. The boundary of the lions is the river Nestus, which flows
through Abdera, and the Achelous, which flows through Acarnania. To the east
of the Nestus, in all of the nearer part of Europe, you will never see a lion, nor
west of the Achelous in the rest of the mainland; but they are found in the land
between these rivers. (7.125-7.126) [106] 162
162 Hurwit, “Reading the Chigi Vase” 11, n. 36, wonders if Herodotus’ lions were mountain lions. It is
important to keep in mind that if by “mountain lions,” he means the big cats also known today as
“cougars,” “pumas,” panthers,” and “catamounts” (Felis Concolor), they are native to the Americas and not
to the Old World. For a discussion of this species and its various names, see S. Ewing, E. Grossman, eds.,
Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion (Seattle, 1999). The use of camels in war is also
mentioned by Aristotle (HA 632a), in the context of his discussion of animals’ castration: “the female
camels too are castrated when they wish to use them for war, so that they should not carry young”;
translation: D. M. Balme, ed., tr., Aristotle XI. History of Animals. Books VII-X (Cambridge, Mass. and
London, 1991) 403.
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