Gaius Caesar is disappointed with the quality of the entertainment on offer in Rome’s Circus Maximus.
The well-known story of Androcles and the lion goes back to an eyewitness account written down by Apion (?30 BC - AD ?48), a learned Egyptian whose works are, sadly, entirely lost. Fortunately, passages survive in the work of Aulus Gellius (AD ?125–?180+), and what follows here is based on his ‘Attic Nights’.