Yesterday I was in Venice and went to the Arsenale Gate, the monumental gateway to Venice’s medieval and renaissance-era shipyards and armaments factory area. The gateway was constructed in the late 15th century (1460), but substantially enlarged after 1571 in celebration of the naval victory at the Battle of Lepanto, which checked Ottoman advancement into the Adriatic. Part of the ancillary decorations are a series of lions stolen from various places throughout Venice’s colonial empire. See the one peeking his head out in the distance on the right? He’s from the island of Delos, in the Aegean, and he’s ancient Greek in origin, probably about 2500 years old. Several of his former mates are still standing there on Delos. The big fellow in the foreground left is the guy I want to talk about. He’s known as the ‘Piraeus Lion’. He, too, is an ancient Greek lion, from the 4th century BC. So around 2400 years old. He came from the port of Athens, Greece, which is how he got his name (Piraeus is the port of Athens). Where he originally came from is anybody’s guess, the Romans had put him in place in Piraeus in the first or second century CE. Italian voyagers called Piraeus ‘Porta Leone’ because of this lion. At some point, he was part of a fountain and spewed water from his mouth (the tubing still exists in his body). He was taken away by the Venetian commander Francesco Morosini in 1687. Morosini had been in Athens trying to take the city from the Ottoman Turks. It was one of his rockets that landed in the gunpowder magazine of the acropolis, which happened to be in the Parthenon, thus blowing out the entire south side of columns. So when you go there and see that big space with no columns you can think of dear Francesco. Morosini took, as part of the loot, this lion, and placed it at the Arsenale Gate as a monument to his victory. If that isn’t interesting enough, do you see that curving line on the lion’s ‘shoulder’? There are other curving lines and text is visible. They’re runic inscriptions carved by Viking Varangian soldiers who served the Byzantine emperors. They carved graffiti into the lion some time in the 11th century while the lion was in Piraeus. The Vikings, when they took the port, lost a kinsman named Horsi, and carved the runes in his honour.  Part of the inscription reads: “They cut him down in the midst of his forces. But in the harbor the men cut runes by the sea in memory of Horsi, a good warrior. The Swedes set this on the lion. He went his way with good counsel, gold he won in his travels.The warriors cut runes, hewed them in an ornamental scroll. Áskell [and others] and ÞorlæifR had them well cut, they who lived in Roslagen. [N. N.] son of [N. N.] cut these runes. UlfR and [N. N.] colored them in memory of Horsi.” Apparently they were painted when originally done. Like I say, if this lion could talk. It seemed banal to reduce this magnificent feline to the symbol of the evangelist St Mark; he was a creature who stood proud over ancient centuries long before St Mark ever walked the earth.