APOLLO'NIUS, of TYRE, the hero of a Greek romance, which enjoyed great popularity in the middle ages, and was translated into almost all the languages of western Europe. In it are related the romantic adventures which befell A., a Syrian prince, previous to his marriage with the daughter of king Alcistrates, of Cyrene. To these are added the adventures of his wife, who was parted from him by apparent death, as well as those of his daughter Tarsia, who was carried off by pirates, and sold in 3lity-lene. The poem closes with the reunion of the whole family. The original Greek work no longer exists; but there are three very early Latin versions, of which one was published by Weiser (Augsburg, 1595); another is to be found in the Gesta Romanorum; and the third in the Pantheon of Gottfried of Viterbo. From this Latin source have proceeded the Span. i511 version of the .13th c., printed in Sanchez's Colleccion de Poesias Castellanos (2d edition, Paris, 1842), several French versions, in prose and verse, as well as several Italian. As early as the 11th c. there was an Anglo-Saxon adaptation of the work, and subsequently various English ones appeared. Shakespeare has treated the subject
in his drama of Pericles; he substantially follows Gower, in 'his Confessio Amantis, who bases his narrative on the Pantheon of Gottfried of Viterbo. Three popular English stories, drawn from a French version of this romance, appeared in London in 1510, 1576. and 1607; while the Dutch, in 1493, derived theirs from theGerman. The romance was rendered into German, probably from the Gesta Romanorum, by a certain " Heinrich von der Neuenstadt" (i.e., Vienna), about the year 1300, in the form of a long and, as yet, unpublished poem. Later, we have a Histori des Kftniges Appolonii, translated from Gottfried of Viterbo, and first published at Augsburg in 1476. Simrock, in his Sources (Ff Shakespeare, narrates the story as it is given in the Gesta Romanorum. A modern Greek translation of the Latin romance, undertaken in 1500 by Gabriel Contianus of Crete, and several times reprinted at Venice, must not be confounded with the lost Greek original.