Androcles Classical accounts. Agostino Veneziano depicts the slave Androcles being freed by the Emperor in a work from 1516-17 now in the LACMA collection. There is also an early pen and wash drawing by Baldassare Peruzzi dating from the 1530s in the Hermitage Museum. Dependent on the account by Aulus Gellius, it depicts Androcles walking through a doorway with the lion on a lead at his heel. Other artists have preferred the scene of Androcles pulling the thorn from the lion's paw, as in Bernhard Rode's print of 1784. A later American example is Walter Inglis Anderson's block print scroll of
Androcles on this occasion, is then quoted as relating: The story was repeated a century later by Claudius Aelianus in his work "On the Nature of Animals". Later 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