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 presently, 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 demanded 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 fourteen years' separation and many vicissitudes. The
earliest Latin MS. of this tale, preserved at Florence, dates from the
9th or 10th 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 which Tarsia propounds to her father
are obviously interpolated. They are taken from the _Enigmata_ of
Caelius Firmianus Symposius. The many inconsistencies of the story seem
to be best explained by the supposition (E. Rohde, _Der griechische
Roman_, 2nd ed., 1900, pp. 435 _et seq_.) that the Antiochus story was
originally entirely separate from the story of Apollonius's wanderings,
and was clumsily tacked on by the Latin author. The romance kept its
form through a vast number of medieval rearrangements, and there is
little change in its outlines as set forth in the Shakespearian play of
_Pericles_.

The Latin tale is preserved in about 100 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. 1893). 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. Steinhowel (Augsburg,
1471), the Dutch version (Delft, 1493), the French in _Le Violier des
histoires romaines_ (Paris, 1521), the English, by Laurence Twine
(London, 1576, new ed. 1607), 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);