The Cambridge Old English Reader

The story of Apollonius of Tyre started life as a Greek popular narrative, probably in the second or third century BC. It was translated into Latin a number of times and subsequently found its way into most of the European vernaculars, but the OE version is the earliest of these known. The popularity of this somewhat gaudy and gory tale, with its successive themes of incest, deception, murder and enforced prostitution, was as long-lasting as it was widespread: in the late sixth century a celebrated poet and man of letters, the bishop Venantius Fortunatus, could allude almost casually to Apollonius as a renowned figure of exile, and the fourteenth-century poet Gower devoted an entire book of his Confessio Amantis to retelling the tale. Chaucer, however, was less approving, characterising it in the introduction to his Man of Law's Tale (lines 81–5) as ‘so horrible a tale for to rede’. Shakespeare used it for his Pericles Prince of Tyre.

The OE version is markedly less spectacular than some of the later retellings, thanks in part to its evidently pedestrian rendering of a now-lost Latin source, including what appear to be a number of simple blunders, but mostly because that part of the tale which contains the most salacious elements is absent from the extant text. This was probably a deliberate omission by the translator, but the loss of some pages from the only extant version, in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 (B), makes it impossible to be certain. The manuscript was copied in the early or middle eleventh century and mainly consists of legal, juridical and homiletic texts associated with Archbishop Wulfstan of York (see Texts 24 and 25). The explanation for the tale's inclusion might be that Apollonius was seen as having saintly qualities, in view of his many stoically borne sufferings.

A nobleman from Tyre, Apollonius has been shipwrecked in Cyrenaica (part of present-day Libya) while on the run from the king of Antioch, after discovering the latter's incestuous relationship with his daughter. The Cyrenaican king, Arcestrates, has observed the ragged and destitute Apollonius taking part in a ball game and has been so impressed with his nobility that he has invited him to a feast.