Apollo'nius

Apollo'nius OF TYRE, the hero of a Greek metrical romance, very popular in the middle ages. It relates the romantic adventures of Apollonius, a Syrian prince, as well as those of his wife who was parted from him by apparent death, and his daughter, and closes with the happy reunion of the whole family. The original no longer exists; but there are three very early Latin versions, of which one was published by Welser (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 Anglo-Saxon version of the 11th century (ed. by Thorpe, 1834), the Spanish version of the 13th century, and several French and Italian versions in prose and verse of the 14th and 15th centuries. Shakespeare treated the subject in his drama of Pericles, mainly following the version of Gower in his Confessio Amantis, itself based on the Pantheon of Gottfried of Viterbo. The romance was rendered into German, probably from the Gesta Romanorum, by a Vienna physician, 'Heinrich von der Neuenstadt,' about the year 1300, in a poem of 20,000 lines. A hitherto unknown Middle German prose version of the story was edited by Schröter in 1872. Simrock narrates the story as it is given in the Gesta Romanorum, in his Quellen des Shakespeare (Bonn, 1872). See Hagen, Der Roman vom König Apollonius in seinen verschiedenen Bearbeitungen (1878).