And as when in the pride of his strength a lion mountain-reared Hath snatched from the pasturing kine a heifer, the best of the herd, And, gripping her neck with his strong teeth, bone from bone hath he snapped, And he rendeth her inwards and gorgeth her blood by his red tongue lapped, And around him gather the dogs and the shepherd-folk, and still Cry long and loud from afar, howbeit they have no will To face him in fight, for that pale dismay doth the hearts of them fill.[156] We seem, in reading these lines—and there are many more like them—to be confronted with a vivified Assyrian or Lycian bas-relief. In the antique sculptures of the valley of the Xanthus, above all, the incident of the slaying of an ox by a lion is of such constant recurrence[157] as almost to suggest, in confirmation of a conjecture by Mr. Gladstone,[158] a similarity of origin between them and the corresponding passages of the Iliad. The lion, indeed, occupies throughout the epic a position which can now with difficulty be conceived as having been assigned to him on the strength of European experience alone. Still, it must not be forgotten that the facts of the matter have radically changed within the last three thousand years. Footnote 156: Way’s _Iliad_, xvii. 61-67. Footnote 157: Fellows’ _Travels in Asia Minor_, p. 348, ed. 1852. Footnote 158: _Studies in Homer_, vol. i. p. 183. In prehistoric times, the lion ranged all over Europe, from the Severn to the Hellespont; for the _Felis spelæus_ of Britain[159] was specifically identical with the grateful clients of Androclus and Sir Iwain, no less than with the more savage than sagacious beasts now haunting the Upper Nile valley, and the marshes of Guzerat and Mesopotamia. Footnote 159: Boyd Dawkins and Sanford, _Pleistocene Mammalia_, p. 171. Already, however, at the early epoch of the pile-built villages by the lake of Constance, he had disappeared from Western Europe; yet he lingered long in Greece. Of his presence in the Peloponnesus only legendary traces remain, although he figures largely in Mycenæan art; but in Thrace he can lay claim to an historically attested existence. Herodotus[160] recounts with wonder how the baggage-camels of Xerxes’ army were attacked by lions on the march from Acanthus to Therma; and he defines the region haunted by them as bounded towards the east by the River Nestus, on the west by the Achelous. Some Chalcidicean coins, too, are stamped with the favourite oriental device of a lion killing an ox; and Xenophon _possibly_—for his expressions are dubious—includes the lion among the wild fauna of Thrace. The statements, on the other hand, of Polybius and Dio Chrysostom leave no doubt that he had finally retreated from our continent before the beginning of the Christian era.[161] Footnote 160: Lib. vii. caps. 125, 126. Footnote 161: Sir G. C. Lewis, _Notes and Queries_, vol. viii. ser. ii. p. 242.