THE BRITISH LION. 79 



nothing else, neither beast of burden nor man, but killed the camels only. I 

 wonder why on earth they should have abstained from the other animals and 

 attacked the camels only, beasts that they had never seen or tasted before. 

 There are in this district many lions and wild oxen with large horns (uri), which 

 the Greeks obtain from the inhabitants by barter. The boundary of the district 

 inhabited by the lions is the river Nestus (Oarasu) that flows through Abdera, 

 and the Achelous, that flows through Acharnania: for neither to the east of the 

 Nestus is there a lion anywhere in that part of Europe, nor to the west of the 

 Achelous in the rest of the continent, but it lives only in the district between 

 those rivers. 



It must be remarked that in this precise account Herodotus, with his 

 usual accuracy, defines only the eastern and western boundaries, which 

 he knew, and says nothing about the unknown region to the north. 

 The story of the lions was still fresh in the memory of the hunters of 

 Chalkidike when it was picked up by Herodotus in his travels some 

 twenty-five years afterward, and used to light up his narrative. It is 

 certain, then, that the lion lived in b. c. 480 in the forests south of the 

 Balkans, between these two boundaries, and probably as far south as 

 the Gulf of Lepanto and the Isthmus of Corinth. It probably ranged 

 also northward into the valley of the Danube. 



We are indebted to Xenophon, about a hundred years later, for 

 the next mention of the lion in Europe. In his " Treatise on Hunting " 

 (xi, i), which he wrote on his banishment from Athens in his splen- 

 did retreat in Lacedaemon, after he had exchanged the court and the 

 camp for the pleasures of gardening and hunting, he says : " Lions, 

 pardaleis" (probably a leopard), "lynxes, panthers, bears, and such like 

 beasts, are caught in foreign countries in the neighborhood of Mount 

 Pangreum, and Mount Cissus, which is beyond Macedonia, and in the 

 Mysian Olympus and in Pindus, and in Xyse that is above Syria, and 

 in other mountains that can support such animals." Mount Pangseum 

 is near the sources of the Xestus, and Cissus is close to Thessalonica, 

 and therefore this passage strongly confirms the truth of the story 

 told by Herodotus. It is, however, rejected by Baron Cuvier and Sir 

 G. C. Lewis, on the grounds that all these animals are not likely to 

 have lived in any one of the above localities, and that it is a general 

 statement relating to Europe and Asia Minor. Taken along with the 

 statement of Herodotus, and the further fact that the lynx and bear 

 still live in the same region, it seems to me that Xenophon knew what 

 he was writing about when he advised the hunters to capture the 

 above animals by the use of poisoned meat in those districts. Wheth- 

 er Xenophon's advice was taken or not, we find in the pages of the 

 next writer, some fifty years afterward, that the lions were becoming 

 rare in Europe. Aristotle describes their range nearly in the same 

 words as Herodotus, but in the interval of a hundred and fifty years 

 the " many lions " [ttoXXoI Xeovreg) of the one had become " the few " 

 (andviov Xtvog) of the other, and they had by that time been driven 



