Apollonius of Tyre
The Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri is a late antique Latin romance whose translation into Old English is the first rendering of its kind into a vernacular of Western early medieval Europe. Set in the far‑flung Mediterranean world, the Historia Apollonii gained wide acclaim from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages for themes of love, chastity, incest, kingship, seafaring, shipwreck, separation, reunion, and the supernatural. Surviving in 114 Latin codices across six centuries, its tradition divides into Continental Recensions (A and B), and a Mixed Group. The earliest witness, a ninth‑century Montecassino manuscript, is now in Florece, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. lxvi 40.
The Old English Apollonius, preserved uniquely in the eleventh-century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 (pp. 131–145), likely drew on a Latin exemplar from the mixed group, the so‑called Circulus Anglicus. Among the many, most scholars’ attention has focused mainly on three twelfth-century Latin witnesses:
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 318
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc 247
Vienna, Hofbibliothek, MS 226
Within the same timeframe, Raith (1956) and Goolden (1958) produced a critical edition whose criteria are similar: they proposed a reconstructed‑conflated text, relying primarily on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 318. Unlike its Latin sources, the Old English Apollonius contains a major gap: the central section of the Historia Apollonii is missing. Even so, the plot remains clear, allowing us to follow the main themes of Apollonius’s story—exile, shipwreck, marriage, and the recovery of his inheritance.
The Historia Apollonii recounts the trials of Apollonius, prince of Tyre, who uncovers King Antiochus’s incestuous secret through a riddle set to win the hand of Antiochus’s daughter and is forced into exile. He endures shipwreck, famine, and pursuit, yet proves generous by saving a starving city. In Pentapolis he marries a virtuous princess, but soon suffers a devastating loss: his wife seemingly taken by death and his child separated from him. After years of grief and wandering, providence reunites him with both. Justice falls on the treacherous, and Apollonius regains his throne, ruling in peace and prosperity until the end of his long life.
Strikingly, the secular narrative of the Old English Apollonius survives solely in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 201 (pp. 131–45), a manuscript otherwise dominated by legal, homiletic, liturgical and other religious writings associated with the circle of Archbishop Wulfstan. At first glance, its presence alongside the Regularis Concordia and similar texts seems discordant: the Historia Apollonii is neither hagiography nor overtly didactic religious treatise, but a romance rooted in a fur-flung, non-Christian Mediterranean past.
Yet the rationale for its inclusion becomes clearer when one attends to its narrative architecture. Though the translation is often attentive to the Latin text, it cannot be denied that in some cases, in a subtle and veiled way, some small parts of the tale were slightly adapted in its Old English form with consideration for the Christian cultural context. Erotic episodes were diminished through a careful prudery; details that might raise doctrinal suspicion were excised; and yet the essential arc of the story—its moral conflicts, perils, and redemptions—was scrupulously preserved. The result is not an incongruous romance thrust into a Christian environment. For the reader in pre-Conquest England, the Old English Apollonius resonated because it echoed literary tastes well attested in the Old English corpus. Its themes—royal justice, riddling wisdom, the perilous sea, the trials of exile, chastity, and providential restoration—interlocked seamlessly with a cultural imagination trained on gnomic wisdom, heroic exile-poetry, and Christian exegesis. Some narrative nodes can be identified that would have appealed directly to the tastes of an Early English audience:
- A warning against tyrannical kingship
- Riddles and the value of salvific wisdom
- The sea as space of trial and faith
- A generous exiled prince
- Chaste, virtuous love
- Providential justice and restoration
Taken together, these elements reveal how the Old English Apollonius, far from being a seemingly unconventional secular import, was naturalized within the spiritual and cultural landscape of Early Medieval England. Rather, it was perceived as an exemplum, a story capable of supporting moral reflection both for rulers and for the cloistered life, reinforcing communal teaching, and nourishing a monk’s lectio divina (‘divine reading’, the practice of meditating and praying over the Holy Writ). In this way, a zealous Christian translator could deploy Apollonius’s adventures as vivid moral anecdotes—exempla for preaching, reflections for communal edification, or meditative prompts within the rhythm of monastic reading. In this guise, the Old English Apollonius ceases to be a notable deviation within the contents of MS CCCC 201. Instead, it emerges as a deliberately slightly recast romance, one whose narrative energy is harnessed for the moral and spiritual instruction of its pre-Conquest addressees.
a warning against tyrannical kingship
The narrative opens with Antiochus, whose incestuous bond with his daughter defines him as an arleas cyning (‘wicked king’, Ch. III). Though he appears to his citizens as if he were a devoted father (Ch. III), the translator underscores his corruption by labeling him se wælreowa cyning (‘the cruel king’, Ch. IV)—a phrase absent in the Latin original. Later, Apollonius, shipwrecked, cries to the sea: þu eart wælreowra þonne Antiochus se cyngc (‘you are more bloodthirsty than King Antiochus’, Ch. XII; for both the text and traslation, see Treharne 2000), echoing other Old English portrayals of impious rulers. The force of this imagery is sharpened in Wulfstan’s Institutes of Polity, where kingship follows a strict hierarchy: the Celestial King (§ I), the earthly king (§ II), and rule patterned on heaven (§ III). This vision echoes older gnomic lore that a king must hold his realm (Maxims II 1a). Antiochus, however, not only fails to hold his realm but corrupts it. As Institutes (§ II.16–23) stresses, a righteous king must protect both folc (‘people’) and cirice (‘church’). Through incest and murder, Antiochus embodies the rex iniquus (‘evil king’), serving as a warning of the dire cost of failed kingship (Maxims I 133b–134).
Riddles and the value of salvific wisdom
The riddle episode at the incipit of the Historia Apollonii is central to its narrative. In pre-Conquest England, riddles were a prized literary form, as the Exeter Book Riddles attest. In the Old English Apollonius (Ch. IV), the translator also cites in Latin the riddle that Antiochus posed to his daughter’s suitors as a perilous enigma:
Scelere vereor, materna carne vescor
Scylde Ic þolige, moddrenum flæsce Ic bruce
[I suffer wickedness, I enjoy the flesh of the mother]
The riddle is then completed with this statement:
Quaero patrem meum, meae matris virum, uxoris meae filiam nec invenio
Ic sece minne fæder, mynre modor wer, mines wifes dohtor, and Ic ne finde
[I seek my father, the husband of my mother, the daughter of my wife, and cannot find them.]
Those who failed were beheaded, their heads set above the city gate. Against this threat, Apollonius prevails: mid wisdome, and mid Godes fultume he þæt soð arædde (‘with wisdom, and with God’s help, he interpreted the truth’, Ch. IV). The mention of mid Godes fultume firmly links riddles with the pursuit of wisdom and salvific discernment. Thus, the riddle emerges not merely as entertainment but as a vessel of Christian teaching. As Maxims I and Maxims II attest, riddles and enigmata were deeply woven into Early English culture, even before conversion, making the Old English Apollonius fully consonant with the moral and spiritual framework of MS CCCC 201.
The Sea as space of Trial and Faith
Marked by the death of his companions and the shattering of the vessel, the shipwreck scene is the climax of the Historia Apollonii. Read through a Christian lens (Chs. XI–XII), it fuses human fragility with divine providence. In the Old English, Apollonius survives ana [...] mid sunde (‘alone [...] by swimming’, Ch. XII), rather than solus tabulae beneficio (‘by the aid of a plank’), a deliberate adaptation unique to this version. Thus the text becomes an allegory of the navigatio vitae (‘the voyage of life’, the metaphor likening human life to a perilous sea journey toward salvation), where Apollonius stands as an exemplum of perseverance and faith. Comparison with the Insular Latin of CCCC 318 shows that many nautical details were already stripped away, giving the Old English a pared-down texture. Yet it insists the ship is utterly shattered, underscoring the trial’s extremity and the providential nature of survival. In patristic thought the ship symbolized the Church; to avoid implying that the vessel of salvation could break, the Old English deliberately omits such imagery—a choice reflecting both caution and theological precision.
A generous exiled prince
The theme of exile recurs in the Historia Apollonii, where Apollonius, despite displacement, distinguishes himself through constatnt altruism. In Tarsus, he embodies sinc-giefa (‘giver of treasure’)—the kingly generosity central to pre-Conquest ideals (Ch. IX):
Ic sille eowrum ceastergewarum hundteontig þusenda mittan hwætes gif ge minne fleam bedigliað
[I can give to your citizens a hundred thousand measures of wheat if you will conceal my flight.]
By feeding the starving populace, Apollonius fulfills the ethos of Maxims II 28b–29a, which declares that in the hall a king should dispense rings; likewise, the munificence of King Scyld Scefing in Beowulf (l. 11b) reinforces the idea that true sovereignty rests on generosity, not birth alone. Apollonius’s deeds also echo the elegiac tones of The Wanderer and The Seafarer, where exile fuses earthly trial with spiritual ascent. Service to others ennobles his hardship, transforming exile into a stage for Christian kingship. As King Hrothgar warns in Beowulf 1760b, pride is to be rejected; similarly, the narrative of Apollonius enacts this very principle, as he attains renown through selfless giving. Apollonius attains renown through selfless giving. Thus, the Tarsus episode shows how the Old English Apollonius recast a late antique tale within the framework of pre-Conquest ideals, where virtuous action defines true kingship.
A Model of Chaste and Virtuous Love
The Pentapolis love episode in the Old English Apollonius is notably stripped of eroticism. The princess praises not beauty but virtue (Ch. XVII):
Sodlice, mid þy þe þæs cynges dohtor geseah þæt Apollonius on eallum godum cræftum swa wel wæs getogen, þa gefeol hyre mod on his lufe
[Truly, when the king’s daughter saw that Apollonius was so well instructed in all useful skills, then her mind fell in love with him.]
Yet the word lufu (literally ‘love’) carries a chastened nuance, closer to esteem than passion, as their union is framed by study and learning rather than desire. Later, in Ch. XX, Apollonius remarks on the importance of reading, writing, and understanding a message—skills perhaps taken for granted in the modern age, yet of profound significance in the early medieval world:
Na, ac Ic blissige swiðor ðæt þu miht, ðurh ða lare þe þu æt me underfenge, þe silf on gewrite gecyðan hwilcne heora þu wille
[No, But I would be much happier if you were able, because of the tuition that you have received from me, yourself to reveal in writing which one of them you desire.]
This prudence is clearly deliberate: in fact, Old English texts often excised amoris audacia (‘love’s audacity’) in favour of lāre (‘learning’). Her father confirms: ac þonne heo mæg hi fram hyre lare geæmtigan, þonne sænde Ic eow word (‘but when she can be at leisure from her studies, then I will send you news’, Ch. XXI). Even the harp scene (Ch. XVI) frames artistic skill as a divine gift. Set against the elegiac passion of The Wife’s Lament 25–30, the princess’s longing appears disciplined, embodying the Benedictine Reform’s ideal of chaste, virtuous love.
Providential justice and restoration
The resolution of the Historia Apollonii affirms providential justice. In Diana’s temple (Ch. XLVIII), Apollonius recounts his sufferings, believing his wife dead, until she rises before him, declaring she had loved him na for galnesse ac for wisdome (‘not because of lust but because of wisdom’, Ch. XLIX). Their reunion transforms him from forlidenum (‘the shipwrecked man’) into a mæra cyngc (‘glorious king’, Ch. XLIX). Justice peaks in Tarsus: Stranguillo and Dionysias are condemned, while Thasia intercedes for Theophilus, affirming the redemptive value of grace (Ch. L). The translator’s final note—Her endað ge wea ge wela Apollonius þæs Tiriscan (‘Here ends both the grief and the happiness of Apollonius the Tyrenian’, Ch. LI)—seals the symmetry: exile gives way to restoration. Seen through the lens of a Christian translator, the humble half mantle bestowed by the fisherman is transformed into the royal insignia, symbolising the victory promised to those emerging from tribulation (Rev. 7:14). Through trials and adversity, joy is fully restored; in this light, Apollonius stands as a Christ-like Everyman, a model for imitation, recalling the promise of John 16:33 (‘In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world’). Thus, Apollonius’s legacy might foreshadow the Christian hope of salvation through endurance.
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Due to the multifaceted nature of CCCC 201, the compiler may have chosen to include the Old English Historia Apollonii rather than its Latin source in order to address multiple audiences and serve diverse purposes. For the monastic community, it could function as a text for lectio divina, offering moral exempla on kingship, chastity, exile, and providential justice; for the aristocracy, it could serve as a mirror for princes, articulating ideals of governance, virtue, and Christian caritas (‘charity’). Its placement alongside legal, homiletic, and penitential texts ensured it would not be dismissed as mere entertainment but received as a narrative charged with spiritual significance.
The adaptation of the romance into Old English is not neutral: subtle omissions and re-shapings, such as the prudery evident in the Pentapolis episode or the replacement of solus tabulae beneficio with ana mid sunde, reveal deliberate choices aimed at harmonizing the text with Christian doctrine and monastic sensitivities. In doing so, the tale ceased to be a foreign Mediterranean romance and became a tool for moral reflection in pre-Conquest England. Such adaptations were not merely literary but participated in a broader cultural project: the attempt to shape a Christian identity for the nascent natio anglica (‘English nation’), bound by ideals of Christian kingship as articulated by Wulfstan.
After the death of King Cnut (d. 1035)—whose reign and that of his descendants may have occasioned the inclusion of the Old English Apollonius in CCCC 201—the project of a unified Christian polity waned. The struggles of later Early English kings and the eventual collapse at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 ensured that this dream remained unfulfilled. Still, the Old English Apollonius stands as testimony to the cultural effort: a secular story re-fashioned in a veiled way into an instrument of moral teaching, bridging the worlds of monastic contemplation and royal ideology, and bearing witness to the intellectual and spiritual aspirations of its age, which seem to be part and parcel of the collection of texts penned in the miscellany MS CCCC 201.
Select Bibliography
Digitised Manuscripts:
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201:
https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/cr485km1781
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 318:
https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/qq824qn0842
Editions:
Goolden, Peter, ed. The Old English “Apollonius of Tyre” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
Kobayashi, E., ed. The Story of Apollonius of Tyre in Old and Middle English (Tokyo: Sansyusya, 1991).
Kortekaas, Gregorius A. A., ed. The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre: A Study of Its Greek Origin and an Edition of the Two Oldest Latin Recensions, Mnemosyne, Bibliotheca Classica Batava, Supplementum 253 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
Panayotakis, Stelios, ed. The Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre: A Commentary (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).
Raith, Josef, ed. Die alt- und mittelenglischen Apollonius‑Bruchstücke: mit dem Text der Historia Apollonii nach der englischen Handschriftengruppe (CCCC MS 201), Studien und Texte zur Englischen Philologie 3 (München: M. Huber, 1956).
Zupitza, Julius. ‘Die altenglische Bearbeitung der Erzählung von Apollonius von Tyrus’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen 97 (1896), 17–34.
Translations:
Thorpe, Benjamin, transl. The Anglo‑Saxon Version of the Story of Apollonius of Tyre: Upon Which Is Founded the Play of Pericles, Attributed to Shakespeare (London: J. and A. Arch, 1834).
Treharne, Elaine, ed. and transl. Old and Middle English c.890–c.1400: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 234–53.
Criticism:
Anlezark, Daniel. ‘Reading ‘The Story of Joseph’ in MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201’, in The Power of Words: Anglo-Saxon Studies Presented to Donald G. Scragg on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Hugh Magennis and Jonathan Wilcox (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia UP, 2006), pp. 61–94.
Archibald, Elizabeth. Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations. Including the Text of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri with an English Translation (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991).
Atherton, Mark. ‘Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 as a Mirror for a Prince: Apollonius of Tyre, Archbishop Wulfstan and King Cnut’, English Studies 97 (2016), 451–72.
Cocco, Gabriele. ‘From Wea to Wela: Shipwreck as a Foreshadowing of Salvation in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, Filologia Germanica / Germanic Philology 5 (2013), 49–68.
——. ‘Quid enim ‘tabula’ cum ‘Historia Apollonii’?: Abridging and Translating a Lay Novel in Late Old English Christian Prose’, Spolia, Numero Speciale (2023), 101–28.
——. ‘Wælreow, arleas or arfæst cyning? Christian Perspectives on Kingship in the late Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, in Luflice ond freondlice. Studi in onore di Maria Elena Ruggerini, ed. Carla Cucina, Lorenzo Lozzi Gallo and Veronka Szőke (Milan: Prometheus, 2023), pp. 63–87.
D’Ignazio, Sophia. ‘Women’s Public Language in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 59 (2023), 32–57.
García, Ana María, and Juan Carlos Martín. ‘Aspects of Punctuation in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, Folia Linguistica Historica 26 (2005), 165–187.
García, Ana María, Juan Carlos Martín, and D. M. Olalla. ‘The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the Light of the Old English Concordancer’, in The Changing Face of English: A New Look at the History of the Language, ed. María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 191–212.
Goepp, Philip H. ‘The Narrative Material of Apollonius of Tyre’, ELH 5 (1938), 193–223.
Helming, E. M. ‘The Absolute Participle in the Apollonius of Tyre’, Modern Language Notes, 45 (1930), 113–19.
Kobayashi, Eichi. ‘The Old English Apollonius of Tyre Is Complete as It Stands’, Educational Studies 29 (1987), 211–33.
——. ‘On the “Lost” Portions in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, in Explorations in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Kazuko Inoue (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1979), pp. 112–130.
Koichi, N. ‘Rhetorical Analysis of Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri and the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, The Journal of Humanities, Meiji University 48 (1997), 55–78.
Marafioti, Mirella. ‘The HA’s Similarity to the Pattern of the Histories and Hagiographies Written in Reformed Communities’, English Studies 97 (2019), 21–50.
McGowan, Joseph. ‘The Old English «Apollonius of Tyre» and the Latin Recensions’, Proceedings of the Patristic, Mediaeval and Renaissance Conference 12/13 (1987–1988), 179-195.
——. ‘Royal Titles in the Old English Apollonius: Two Emendations’, Studia Neophilologica 61 (1989), 139–44.
——. ‘The Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, Explicator 49 (1991), 74–75.
Meyer, W., ‘Über den lateinischen Text der Geschichte des Apollonius von Tyrus’, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und historischen Classe der K. Bayerischen Akademie (1872), pp. 3-28.
Morini, Claudia. ‘The First English Love Romance without “Love”: The Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, SELIM 12 (2003–2004), 109–125.
Pickford, T. E. ‘Apollonius of Tyre as Greek Myth and Christian Mystery’, Neophilologus 59 (1975), 599–609.
Pottle, Frederick A. ‘Næs gït yfel wïf in the Old English Apollonius’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 30 (1931), 163–74.
Rupp, Katrin. ‘Of Apollonius of Tyre’, in Families and Family Relations as Represented in Early English and Scandinavian Literature, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1996), pp. 95–112.
Salvador‑Bello, Mercedes. ‘The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the Light of Early Romance Tradition: An Assessment of Its Plot and Characterization in Relation to Marie de France’s Eliduc’, English Studies 93 (2012), 749–74.
Semper, Philippa, G. Jaritz, and G. Moreno Riano. ‘Going Round in Circles? Time in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Gerson Moreno‑Riano (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 297–308.
Simpson, Dale W. ‘Word Order and Style in the Old English “Apollonius of Tyre”’, PhD dissertation, (University of North Texas, 1983).
Townsend, D. ‘The Naked Truth of the King’s Affection in the Old English Apollonius of Tyre’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 173–96.
Wilcox, Jonathan. Humour in Old English Literature: Communities of Laughter in Early Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023).
Wormald, Patrick. The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century. Vol. 1: Legislation and Its Limits (Oxford: OUP, 1999).
Zupitza, Julius, ‘Welcher Text liegt der altenglischen Bearbeitung der Erzählung von Apollonius von Tyrus zu Grunde’?’. Romanische Forschungen 3 (1886), pp. 269–79.
Gabriele Cocco is Associate Professor of Germanic Philology at the University of Bergamo. His research mainly focuses on gnomic poetry and Christian literature with specific attention to liturgy, monastic poetics, and the influence of the thought of the Church Fathers in Early Medieval England. He has edited Maxims I and Maxims II; he has also worked on the Old English translation of the Historia Apollonii, and the elegies of the Exeter Book. He has studied the role of death liturgy in Cynewulf’s The Fates of the Apostles.
