APOLLONIUS OF TRALLES (in Caria), a Greek sculptor, who flourished in the 2nd century B.C. With his brother Tauriscus, he executed the marble group known as the Farnese Bull, representing Zethus and Amphion tying the revengeful Dirce to the tail of a wild bull.
See [Greek Art], pl. i. fig. 51.
APOLLONIUS OF TYANA, a Greek philosopher of the Neo-Pythagorean school, born a few years before the Christian era. He studied at Tarsus and in the temple of Asclepius at Aegae, where he devoted himself to the doctrines of Pythagoras and adopted the ascetic habit of life in its fullest sense. He travelled through Asia and visited Nineveh, Babylon and India, imbibing the oriental mysticism of magi, Brahmans and gymnosophists. The narrative of his travels given by his disciple Damis and reproduced by Philostratus is so full of the miraculous that many have regarded him as an imaginary character. On his return to Europe he was saluted as a magician, and received the greatest reverence from priests and people generally. He himself claimed only the power of foreseeing the future; yet in Rome it was said that he raised from death the body of a noble lady. In the halo of his mysterious power he passed through Greece, Italy and Spain. It was said that he was accused of treason both by Nero and by Domitian, but escaped by miraculous means. Finally he set up a school at Ephesus, where he died, apparently at the age of a hundred years. Philostratus keeps up the mystery of his hero’s life by saying, “Concerning the manner of his death, if he did die, the accounts are various.” The work of Philostratus composed at the instance of Julia, wife of Severus, is generally regarded as a religious work of fiction. It contains a number of obviously fictitious stories, through which, however, it is not impossible to discern the general character of the man. In the 3rd century, Hierocles (q.v.) endeavoured to prove that the doctrines and the life of Apollonius were more valuable than those of Christ, and, in modern times, Voltaire and Charles Blount (1654-1693), the English freethinker, have adopted a similar standpoint. Apart from this extravagant eulogy, it is absurd to regard Apollonius merely as a vulgar charlatan and miracle-monger. If we cut away the mass of mere fiction which Philostratus accumulated, we have left a highly imaginative, earnest reformer who laboured to infuse into the flaccid dialectic of paganism a saner spirit of practical morality.
See L. Dyer, Studies of the Gods in Greece (New York, 1891); A. Chassang, Le Merveilleux dans l’antiquité (1882); D.M. Tredwell, Sketch of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana (New York, 1886); F.C. Baur, Apollonius von Tyana und Christus, ed. Ed. Zeller (Leipzig, 1876,—an attempt to show that Philostratus’s story is merely a pagan counterblast to the New Testament history); J. Jessen, Apollonius v. Tyana und sein Biograph Philostratos (Hamburg, 1885); J. Göttsching, Apollonius von Tyana (Berlin, 1889); J.A. Froude, Short Studies, vol. iv.; G.R.S. Mead, Apollonius of Tyana (London, 1901); B.L. Gildersleeve, Essays and Studies (New York, 1890); Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius (Eng. trans. New York, 1905); O. de B. Priaulx, The Indian Travels of Apollonius (1873); F.W.G. Campbell, Apoll. of Tyana (1908); see also [Neo-Pythagoreanism].
APOLLONIUS OF TYRE, a medieval tale supposed to be derived from a lost Greek original. The earliest mention of the story is in the Carmina (Bk. vi. 8, II. 5-6) of Venantius Fortunatus, in the second half of the 6th century, and the romance may well date from three centuries earlier. It bears a marked resemblance to the Antheia and Habrokomes of Xenophon of Ephesus. The story relates that King Antiochus, maintaining incestuous relations with his daughter, kept off her suitors by asking them a riddle, which they must solve on pain of losing their heads. Apollonius of Tyre solved the riddle, which had to do with Antiochus’s secret. He returned to Tyre, 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. Steinhöwel (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 für neuere Sprachen, 1896); there is a Middle English metrical version (J.O. Halliwell, A New Boke about Shakespeare, 1850), by a poet who says he was vicar of Wimborne; John Gower uses the tale as an example of the seventh deadly sin in the eighth book of his Confessio Amantis; Robert Copland translated a prose romance of Kynge Apollyne of Thyre (Wynkyn de Worde, 1510) from the French; Pericles was entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1607, and was followed in the next year by George Wilkins’s novel, The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre (ed. Tycho Mommsen, Oldenburg, 1857), and George Lillo drew his play Marina (1738) from the piece associated with Shakespeare; Orendel, by a Middle High German minnesinger, contains some of the episodes of Apollonius; Heinrich von Neustadt wrote a poem of 20,000 lines on Apollonius von Tyrland (c. 1400); the story was well known in Spanish, Libre de Apolonio (verse, c. 1200), and in J. de Timoneda’s Patrañuelo (1576); in French much of it was embodied in Jourdain de Blaives (13th cent.), and it also appears in Italian and medieval Greek. See A.H. Smyth, Shakespeare’s Pericles and Apollonius of Tyre (Philadelphia, 1898); Elimar Klebs, Die Erzahlung van A. aus Tyrus (Berlin, 1899); S. Singer, Apollonius van Tyrus (Halle, 1895).