Lions existed in Southern Europe and the Near-East in more rural mountainous regions during the Iron Age, but they increasingly got more and more rare by the first centuries A.D. largely from hunting, and from pastoral herding expanding in those regions, in which large predators like Lions encouraged to be eradicated . Aristotle writing in the middle of the 4th century B.C., gives some details where they still lived in Europe:

*Again, lions are more numerous in Libya, and in that district of Europe that lies between the Achelous and the Nessus; the leopard is more abundant in Asia Minor, and is not found in Europe at all.* (History of Animals 8.606^b 14-16)

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Xenophon also mentions Lions in passing in his hunting treatise '*On Hunting*', and how they were normally hunted:

*Lions, leopards, lynxes, panthers, bears and all similar wild beasts are captured in foreign countries, about Mt. Pangaeus and Cittus beyond Macedonia, on Mysian Olympus and Pindus, on Nysa beyond Syria, and in other mountain ranges capable of supporting such animals. On the mountains they are sometimes poisoned, owing to the difficulty of the ground, with aconite. Hunters put it down mixed with the animals' favourite food round pools and in other places that they frequent. Sometimes, while they are going down to the plain at night, they are cut off by parties of armed and mounted men. This is a dangerous method of capturing them. Sometimes the hunters dig large, round, deep holes, leaving a pillar of earth in the middle. They tie up a goat and put it on the pillar in the evening, and pile wood round the hole without leaving an entrance, so that the animals cannot see what lies in front. On hearing the bleating in the night, the beasts run round the barrier, and finding no opening, jump over and are caught.* (*On Hunting* 11)

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Polybius (*Histories* 12.3.5) implies, and Dio Chrysostomus states, that lions went extinct in the region of modern-day Northern Greece by the 2nd B.C. - 2nd A.D, with Dio Chrysostomus writing:

*It is surely a sad state of affairs, according to what you say, if the beautiful have died out in the course of time just like some plant or animal — the fate which they do say has overtaken the lions in Europe; for the race of lions is now extinct there, though formerly they were to be found in Macedonia and in other places as well — it is unfortunate, I repeat, if beauty has really disappeared from mankind in this way.* (On Beauty 21.1)

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Themistius also writes that by the 4th century A.D., the last of the Lions went extinct in Thessaly (10.140a).

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So seeing a skinned trophy of a Lion in one's lifetime wouldn't far-fetched or very uncoomon, and various cultures (including the Greeks and Romans beginning in the Hellenistic era) sometimes held public displays of live exotic animals, which often included lions. Caesar presented 400 lions, 40 elephants, several Thessalian bulls and giraffe's at his Triumphs in 46 BC. (Suet. Iul. 37; Plin. nat. 8.53, 182; Dio 43.22–3.)

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