Fiction |
Androcles and the Lion:
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Androcles was born a free man, became a slave, then regained his freedom. Our story begins on the afternoon of the day he regained his freedom. This is the true story of the most famous incident of his incomparably strange life.
Androcles, who only the day before had been a slave, was strolling merrily through the forest one fine afternoon as a free man. For earlier that day he learned he’d won the Peloponnesian Lottery—to the tune of 10,000 Drachmas, to be precise, and had immediately purchased his freedom from his evil master, Damocles the Butcher. Take my word for it, my dear friends, a Drachma was a pretty penny back in the day. Our tragic hero, and now former slave, Androcles the Younger, aka “Andy” to his familiars, was deliriously happy as we enter the story in medias res, just as he comes to the 101st item on his newly minted list of spending priorities (“Alimony to 1st wife, Lysistrata, that ungrateful bitch”). At the summit of his joy, he proclaims aloud, “I’m as happy as a Lark!” as he whistles tunelessly (a habit that had always infuriated Lysistrata!) a war song he had learned at the Battle of Thessalonica where he had been captured and made a slave by Damocles the Butcher, who had made his money, not by any government handout, but through his innovations in the meat-packing industry. (In most fables you don’t get this much backstory, but I’ve decided to throw it in at no extra charge.) |
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The Sacrifice
The Sacrifice
When Androcles likened his happiness to a Lark, he was immediately transformed into a Lark, and, in this form, comes upon a wounded Lion moaning in pain from a large thorn embedded deep in his right-front paw.
“All that lottery dough is no use to a Lark,” she mutters to herself (for she had changed gender as well as species). An idea pops into her little bird head and Androclina, as she now thinks of herself, flutters over to the Lion. “My dear fellow,” says she, scrutinizing him ever more closely, “in my former existence as a male human, I believe we acted together in the play, Androcles and the Lion. Yes, it’s you, Leo, isn’t it? As you no doubt recall, I received rave notices. Top billing. Highest paid actor in all of Athens! Eight-month run, wasn’t it?” “Closer to a year, I think. Good to see you again, Andy. Looks like you’ve lost weight.” “Thanks pal. Work out every day. Well, I can’t help but notice that you’re in some discomfort. Of course, in my former life as a man, whether slave or free, rich or poor, I would have been glad to remove that nasty thorn from your paw. As you can see, I’m now slight of stature and no longer have an opposable thumb. So I can’t alleviate your suffering. But—I’ve got an idea that can help us both. Why don’t you eat me? It will put an end to my miserable existence, and, at the same time, provide you with nourishment until a Good Samaritan comes along to pull out that nasty thorn. What d’ya say? Life, after all, is a non-zero sum game.” “What?” says the Lion, clearly out of his depth. “Hmmm. Uh, let me put this in a way even your species can understand: Given the hand we’ve been dealt here, it’s a win-win. Uh, I mean except for the fact that you’ll still be in pain and I’ll be dead.” After puzzling over this curious application of game theory to their predicament for several ponderous minutes, the Lion replies, “Quite right, my little friend,” and swallows Androclina in one gulp, secretly delighted to dispatch his old “friend” down his gullet. Once inside the belly of the beast, Androclina has second thoughts. (3)
In the Belly of the Beast “Uh oh, it’s dark in here. Let me out! Let me out!” she chirps, fluttering about, now to one side, now to the other, inside the Lion’s belly. In this desperate attempt to escape, her beak becomes lodged into the Lion’s left side.
“Ow!” shouts the Lion as the beak penetrates his skin. The Lion leans to his right to alleviate the pain, only to push the thorn deeper into his right-front paw. “Ow!” He leans back to his left, only to further impale himself on the little bird’s sharp beak. “Ow!” By the way, this vivid image of inescapable suffering is anticipated by Homer’s “between Scylla [a rock shoal] and Charybdis [a whirlpool, a “hard place”], the true origin of the phrase that eventually became “caught between a rock and a hard place.” Be that as it may, this is a thorny problem for the Lion, which only serves to exasperate his peevishness over being given so few lines in this new iteration of the fable. |
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Between stabs of pain, the Lion grumbles to himself, “Androcles couldn’t act his way out of a papyrus bag. Hell, I’ve got decent acting chops; after all, I was the real attraction in The Lion and Androcles, whereas that ham, Androcles, as usual, had to resort to the self-indulgent tricks of ‘The Method.’”
Whatever may have been the Lion’s legitimate complaints concerning those youthful days as a struggling thespian (rumor has it that he had not been accepted into the acting school of Thespis, tragedian, poet and reputed founder of Actors’ Equity [6th cent. B.C.]), he now had the more immediate problem of “a thorn in his side,” as well as in his paw, which is the true origin of a phrase we still use to this day ***
But we must now rejoin our protagonist in the dark night of her soul. She has come to accept the consequences of her sacrificial act of self-annihilation, embracing her fate, as she begins to pray:
All of existence is now here.
In or out of the beast’s belly, nothing to fear. (Are we not all dust and ashes?) No, I will shed no tear. Of all the mutations of my strange life, let this be the apogee! This dark place shall my sanctuary be. After three days and three nights, the Lion, suffering from indigestion, at last, vomits the Lark back into the world.
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The New Man Upon being regurgitated into the world, the Lark is immediately transformed back into the young man, Androcles. His first act as a newly formed man, “born again,” as he feels, is to pull the thorn out of the Lion’s paw. He then fetches water from a nearby stream and washes the bloodied right forepaw. The Lion, at long last relieved of his suffering, forgets all past resentments and, in gratitude, affectionately licks the face of his old rival.
They become fast friends. Eventually, the play that had made Androcles, but not the Lion, famous, reopens with the two friends in the leads. The Lion dazzles theatergoers with his boundless resources of technique, sometimes resorting to a faux “Oxford Accent” that has them rolling off their stone benches in gales of laughter, even as Androcles plumbs the deeper waters of “The Method.” They now share equal billing as “the greatest actors of their generation,” as the renowned critic Dionysius Longinus Hepatitis declared (Hepatitis is best remembered today as the author of On the Sublime) in his glowing review of opening night that appeared in the Athens Daily. In those joyful days, Andy and Leo were inseparable, frequently seen walking together in the Athenian marketplace, although the rumor that they were, for a time, romantically linked, has no foundation whatsoever in the historical record. In the course of the next several months, Androcles gives away all his lottery winnings to charity and reconciles with Lysistrata. The two remarry and have eight children together, equally divided between boys and girls. When the irresistible impulse comes upon the former slave to whistle the Battle Hymn of Thessalonica, he makes sure Lysistrata is out of earshot before he begins his ear-splitting, nasal, shrill and tone-deaf piping of that rather dreadful tune. |
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Moral
Moral
Like all true stories, the moral of this one is hard to swallow, I mean follow. It’s just like most of our lives. Don’t we all try, but seldom succeed at tying together all the loose ends into a story that makes sense?
On the cautionary side, the story seems to disprove the old adage, Misery Loves Company (just ask the poor Lion!) and undermines the literal meaning of the old saw, Life is for the Birds (just ask poor Androclina!). Some devotees of the fabulous assert that the meaning is obvious: Beware the power of words! A highly regarded semanticist is more subtle: Choose your similes with care, you aspiring writers, lest they fly away from your true aim, even as the Lark flew away with the happiness of Androcles. Game theorists have argued endlessly over how their mathematical models might resolve the riddle of the fable. In the actual circumstances of our lives are we always doomed to a win-lose scenario (zero sum game), or is a win-win (non-zero sum game) a genuine possibility? But such erudite considerations are above this humble storyteller’s paygrade. Finally, a whole school of interpretation has arisen from those scholars who claim that the moral of the story centers on the precarious balance between freedom and slavery in all our lives. I myself embrace with all my heart, mind and soul this way of understanding the tale. Perhaps I’ve got a fact or two wrong. In the end, I’m not too concerned if you don’t accept every detail of the story as I have told it. Don’t you think that the “truth” of any story, whether fabulous or “historically verifiable,” lies somewhat deeper than a few negligible inaccuracies that might have crept into the telling? All appearances to the contrary, I believe that the lesson of our fable, or true story, as the case may be, runs deep, and is captured best by the opening verse of an ancient and venerable scripture: What we are now comes from our thoughts,
And our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind. XXX
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Don Plansky has participated in many OLLI at SF State writer workshops. In a former incarnation, he worked as a freelance journalist, contributing more than 200 articles to The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, as well as book reviews for The Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies. Don has been a member of the Vistas & Byways Editorial Board since 2015.
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