APOLLONIUS OF TYRE, a mediaeval tale supposed to be derived from a lost Greek original. The earliest mention of the story is in the Carmina (Bk. vi. 8, 11. 5-6) of Venantius For tunatus, in the second half of the 6th century, and the romance may well date from three centuries earlier. It bears a marked resemblance to the Antheia and Habrokomes of Xenophon of Ephesus. The story relates that King Antiochus, maintaining incestuous relations with his daughter, kept off her suitors by asking them a riddle, which they must solve on pain of losing their heads. Apollonius of Tyre solved the riddle, which con cerned Antiochus's secret. He returned to Tyre, and, to escape the king's vengeance, set sail in search of a place of refuge. In Cyrene he married the daughter of King Archistrates, and pres ently, on receiving news of the death of Antiochus, departed to take possession of the kingdom of Antioch, of which he was, for no clear reason, the heir. On the voyage his wife died, or rather seemed to die, in giving birth to a daughter, and the sailors de manded that she should be thrown overboard. Apollonius left his daughter, named Tarsia, at Tarsus in the care of guardians who proved false to their trust. Father, mother, and daughter were only reunited after 14 years' separation and many vicissi tudes. The earliest Latin ms. of this tale, preserved at Florence, dates from the 9th or loth century. The pagan features of the supposed original are by no means all destroyed. The ceremonies observed by Tarsia at her nurse's grave, and the preparations for the burning of the body of Apollonius's wife, are purely pagan. The riddles that Tarsia propounds to her father are obviously interpolated. They are taken from the Enigmata of Caelius Fir mianus Symposius. The many inconsistencies of the story seem to be best explained by the supposition (E. Rohde, Der griech ische Roman, 2nd ed., 1900, pp. 435 et seq.) that the Antiochus story was originally entirely separate from the story of Apollo nius's wanderings, and was clumsily tacked on by the Latin author. The romance kept its form through a vast number of mediaeval re-arrangements, and there is little change in its out lines as set forth in the Shakespearian play of Pericles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—The Latin tale is preserved in about zoo mss., and Bibliography.—The Latin tale is preserved in about zoo mss., and was printed by M. Velser (Augsburg, 1595), by J. Lapaume in Script. Erot. (Didot, Paris, 1856), and by A. Riese in the Bibl. Teubneriana (1871, new ed. 5893). The most widespread versions in the middle ages were those of Godfrey of Viterbo in his Pantheon (1185) , where it is related as authentic history, and in the Gesta Romanorum (cap. 153) , which formed the basis of the German folk-tale by H. Stein howel (Augsburg, 1470, the Dutch version (Delft, 1493) , the French in Le Violier des histoires romaines (Paris, 1521), the English, by Laurence Twine (London, 1576, new ed. 5607), also of the Scandinavian, Czech, and Hungarian tales.
In England a translation was made as early as the 11th century (ed. B. Thorpe, 1834, and J. Zupitza in Archiv fur neuere Sprachen, 1896) ; there is a Middle English metrical version (J. 0. Halliwell, A New Boke about Shakespeare, 185o) , by a poet who says he was vicar of Wimborne; John Gower uses the tale as an example of the seventh deadly sin in the eighth book of his Con f essio Amantis; Robert Copland translated a prose romance of Kynge Apollyne of Thyre (Wynkyn de Worde, 151o) from the French ; Pericles was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1607, and was followed in the next year by George Wilkins's novel, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre (ed. Tycho Mommsen, Oldenburg, 1857), and George Lillo drew his play Marina (1738) from the piece associated with Shakespeare. See A. H. Smyth, Shakespeare's Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre (Philadelphia, 1898) ; Elimar Klebs, Die Erzahlung von A. aus Tyrus (Berlin, 1899) ; S. Singer, Apollonius von Tyrus (Halle,