Apollonius of Tyre

▪ literary character

      chief personage in a medieval Latin romance of unknown authorship, which may be assumed to derive from a lost Greek original. The story enjoyed long and widespread popularity in European literature, and versions of it exist in many languages. The story tells of the separation of Apollonius from his wife and daughter (whom he thinks dead) and his ultimate reunion with them after many travels.

      The Greek original on which this story is thought to be based probably dates from the 3rd century AD. The Latin version is first mentioned in the second half of the 6th century by Venantius Fortunatus (Fortunatus, Venantius), a Christian poet and bishop. The survival of numerous Latin manuscripts (the earliest dating from the 9th or 10th century) testifies to its popularity in the Middle Ages. The most widespread medieval versions include that by Godfrey of Viterbo in his Pantheon, a late 12th-century verse rendering that treated the story as authentic history, and an account contained in the Gesta Romanorum, a 14th-century collection of folktales. An Anglo-Saxon translation (the first English vernacular version) was made in the 11th century, and the 14th-century poet John Gower (Gower, John) used the tale as an example of the seventh deadly sin (Sloth) in his Confessio amantis. Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William) (although changing his hero's name) used the story as the basis of two plays, Pericles and The Comedy of Errors (Comedy of Errors, The).

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