Quoted By:
They most likely got the lion heraldic symbols from the Ancient Romans, who in turn got them from the Greeks.
>The characteristic of the lion as royal animal in particular is due to the influence of the Physiologus, an early Christian book about animal symbolism, originally written in Greek in the 2nd century and translated into Latin in about AD 400. It was a predecessor of the medieval bestiaries.
>At the time, few Europeans had a chance to encounter actual lions, so that painters had to rely on traditional depictions and had no actual animals as models.
