I was recently in Italy and visited a museum there, and there were many sculptures and drawings of lions both in the Greek, Roman and Egyptian section. Those animals are not still there today, so i’m really curious if lions, tigers and other animals were common around those times? What other animals existed in those countries that are not there anymore?
I don’t know about tigers unfortunately, but there used to be prehistoric lions in Europe, although they were extinct long before ancient Rome and Greece were around. There is also an Asiatic lion, which is now found only in India, but in the ancient and medieval world its range was all over the Middle East and maybe as far west as Greece. Lions show up in hunting scenes sometimes in ancient Greek art, so they may have really been hunted at the time, but it’s also possible that the Greeks were just copying Middle Eastern art, like from Assyria and Persia. (There were definitely still lions in the Middle East then.)
Herodotus mentions lions in ancient Macedonia. They attacked the camels that the Persians brought when they invaded Greece. So it’s possible that there were still some lions in the north of Greece at the time, in the 5th century BC. But Herodotus is also notorious for making stuff up...at least, if that specific story didn’t happen, it must have been believable that there could be lions up there.
There weren’t any further west, so the Romans would never have seen a native lion in Italy. But they knew about them from the Greeks and the other territories they conquered further east.
Lions lived in the Middle East until pretty recently. Arabic has dozens of words for “lion”, which means maybe it was a taboo to say “lion” (in case one showed up!) so they used nicknames instead (“roary”, “scowly”, etc).
The 12th century Syrian author Usama ibn Munqidh mentions lions all the time, along with leopards, cheetahs, hyenas…lots of animals that don’t live in the Middle East anymore. Crusaders from Europe encountered lions too. There’s a funny story where one crusader had a pet lion, but left it behind when he returned home, and the lion tried to swim after the boat. So there were definitely lions there until long after the ancient period.
Lions in Egypt are a bit different, since those were the same African lions that still exist now, just with much smaller range much further south. In ancient Egypt there were still lions all along the Nile. The goddess Sekhmet was depicted as a lion, and there was even a city that had a temple dedicated to lions. When the Greeks conquered Egypt they called that city Leontopolis, “Lion City”.