for Greek color and allusions in the earliest Latin versions and have found sufficient to justify Teuffel's conclusion that the original author was a pagan Greek from Asia Minor ("Der Verfasser desselben war vielleicht aus dem griechischen Klein-Asien und noch Heide," Rh. Mus., xxvii, 104). Teuffel adds (id., 103), "das christliche Gewand ist dem Stoffe erst von dem Uebersetzer lässig umgeworfen." A list of the græcisms may be found in Riese, ed. 1871 (xi-xiii). Haupt denied the Greek origin, but was confuted by Rohde. See Thielmann, Ueber Sprache und Kritik des lat. Apollonius Romans, Speier, 1881, for arguments for the Latin origin. of the story.1

There is a singular relationship which cannot be explained as an accidental coincidence between the Apollonius and the Greek sophistic romance of Antheia and Habrokomes, of Xenophon of Ephesus-Xenophontis Ephesii Ephesiacorum, libri V, de Amoribus Anthiæ et Abrocomæ nunc primum prodeunt Latina interpretatione A. Cocchii, London, 1726.2

cum

Antheia and Habrokomes meet in the Temple of Diana, are married, but in obedience to an oracle of Apollo are forced to travel. They become separated and A. falls into the hands of robbers, from whom she is rescued by Perilaus, a young nobleman. A. consents to marry him but, on the eve of the marriage, swallows a sleeping potion which she had secured from a physician, a friend of Perilaus, to whom she has confided her story. She is lamented as dead, and is conveyed to a sepulchre. She awakens in the tomb which is plundered by pirates for the sake of the treasure it contains.

The bold outlines of the narrative are common to both the

1 Cf. E. Klebs, Phil. 47, 80, for evidence that the story is a version of a pagan Latin work of the third century.

2 Cf. Dunlop History of Prose Fiction London, 1888, Vol. i, pp. 61-63. Angelo Poliziano mentions the Ephesian History-Σφεσιακὰ τὰ Κατὰ ̓Ανθίαν και ̓Αβροκόμην—in his Liber. Miscell., li. It was translated into Italian in 1723. There are two other Xenophons nearly contemporary-X. Antiochenus and X. Cyprius.

Douce ("Illustrations") observed that these incidents resemble the leading adventure of Romeo and Juliet though he admits that Xenophon's work was not translated nor published when Luigi da Porto wrote the novel La Giulietta on which Shakespeare's play is based. The story was everywhere popular. Lopez de Vega wrote a play upon it-Los Castelvines y Monteses.

Ephesiaca and the Apollonius. The marriage of the principal figures of the romance is in both instances at the beginning and not at the end of the adventures. The stories are alike in the intended assassination of the heroine by a slave commissioned by a jealous mistress; the compassion of the murderer; the escape of the heroine; her preservation of her purity in a brothel, and the final recognition of the lovers in a temple by means of the hero's repetition in a loud voice of his adventures. Apollonius is succoured by an old fisherman of Cyrene; Habrokomes sojourns with a fisherman of Syracuse. Rohde conjectures that the idyllic sequestration of such a picture of contented poverty called forth imitators (Der griechische Roman, p. 412). The wife of Apollonius is regarded by mistake as Artemis herself, and the same mistake is made with regard to Antheia. The correspondence between the two romances is briefly indicated by W. Meyer (Sitzungsberichte der Münch. Akad. Phil. Cl., 1872, p. 3), and the parallelism is more fully made out by Rohde (Der griechische Roman, pp. 412, 413). The latter even finds in the brevity and dryness of the narrative an indication of a significant correspondence of manner in the two narrators, for the usual romantic style of the period was overflowing with pathos and color.

A correspondence so exact and even verbal is only explicable upon the theory that one of the narrators was the imitator of the other. Of course it is quite conceivable that some Latin follower of later Greek sophistry had ventured an imitation of the Greek prototypes of erotic romance poetry, but the possibility of such an explanation disappears, and the conviction that the Latin Apollonius is a translation of an original Greek romance becomes irresistible when the student discovers in the text-as in a palimpsest, Rohde says—a double stratum of pagan-Greek and Christian-Latin conceptions, customs and turns of expression. It is clear enough that the pagan ground work and the clumsily adjusted Christian additions are by different hands; and if in the oldest Latin version two writers are found to be engaged upon the old text there is hardly a more simple explanation conceivable than that a Greek romance originally written by a Greek of the ancient faith was translated by a Christian of the Latin half of the empire. The love of arts evinced by both men and women in the Apollonius romance smacks more of Greek manners than of Roman, or ChristianRoman iconoclastic zeal; while such a passage as that in which

the fisherman divides his cloak with Apollonius resembles the story of St. Martin and indicates an origin in the Vulgate.'

2

When Tharsia plays upon the harp in the cabin of Apollonius' ship, she proposes to the king, in order to dispel his melancholy, certain riddles derived from the collection of Symphosius. Here there is a reminiscence of a popular kind of Oriental märchen in which the sad and the sick are cheered and healed, by jugglers, mountebanks and fools. J. G. von Hahn, in Griechische und albanesische Märchen, ii, 250, collects some parallels to the Apollonius-Tharsia story that are useful for comparison. He does not mention the Apollonius, but he quotes from Apollodor, iii, cap. vii, para. 7: Euripides sagt [i. e., in his second tragedy Alkmaön], Alkmaön zeugte zur Zeit seines Wahnsinns mit Manto, der Tochter des Tiresias, zwei Kinder, Amphilochos und Tisiphone. Er brachte die Kinder nach Korinth, und übergab sie dem König der Korinther, Kreon, zur Erziehung. Die Tisiphone aber welche sich durch ihre Schönheit auszeichnete wurde von der Gattin des Kreon in die Sklaverei verkauft, weil diese fürchtete, dass sie Kreon zu seiner Frau machen könnte. Alkmaön kaufte sie und hatte sie zur Sklavin, ohne zu wissen, dass es seine Tochter sei. Als er darauf nach Korinth ging, um seine Kinder abzuholen, brachte er auch von dort seinen Sohn mit." Hahn compares the Euripidean story with the northern saga of Aslaug, daughter of Sigurd: "Aslaug als Kind von einem Harfner in seiner Harfe geborgen wird, so ergiebt sich in dem Zitherspiele der jungen Heldin des griechischen Märchens ein neues Verbindungsglied zwischen Aslaug und Tisiphone." The story of Tisiphone is repeated in India. Benfey, Pantschatantra, ii, 201, relates: "Ein König wendet einem Schuhmacher seine Gunst zu, und vertraut ihm sein Söhnchen an. Der Schuhmacher entführt den Knaben in seinem 4ten Jahre, beraubt ihn seiner

1" Sic piscatorem dimidiam sagi partem Apollonio naufrago dantem ad sancti Martini exemplum [Sulpic. Sever. Vita S. Mart. c. 3] conformavit,” Riese, ed. of 1893, p. xviii. The story of Tharsia in the house of the Pander reappears in the ecclesiastical legends, e. g., the legend of St. Agnes. Cf. Simrock, p. 119.

Cf. Leben und Wunderthaten des Heiligen Martin. Aitfranzösisches Gedicht aus dem Anfang des XIII. Jahrhunderts von Plan Gatineau (aus Tours). Herausgegeben von Werner Söderhjelm, Prof. Univ. Helsingfors, in Bibliothek des Litt. Vereins in Stuttgart, 1896, Vol. 210.

"The riddles of Symphosius or Symposius are to be found in many editions. Cf. Cent Enigmes à la Manière de Symposius, Auguste Du Bois [1868]; Epigrammata et Poematia Vetera, 1590. The author was Caelius Firmianus Symposius. See also the conclusion of the Phaedrus of Joannes Meursius, 1610.

Kostbarkeiten und verkauft ihn als Sklaven. Der neue Herr verkauft ihn an seinen Vater, der ihm seine Gunst zuwendet; diese benutzt des Königs Juwelier um ihn zu verführen des Königs Siegel zu stehlen; als ihn dieser dafür hinrichten lassen will, und ihn entkleiden lässt, erkennt er in ihm an einem Male seinen verlorenen Sohn."

The Volksmärchen are marked by childlike simplicity and naïvete. They translate the reader into a realm of extravagant fancy where "One vast realm of wonder spreads around,

And all the muse's tales seem truly told."

The gold that is sown so liberally is fairy gold, and the kings and princesses are fairy people. Not seldom, however, in the midst of the thaumaturgy of the Apollonius narrative a scene is half disclosed that reveals the presence of the attentive and skillful Greek rhetorician who was the first to handle the romance. Thus the scene at the beginning of the banquet with King Archistrates is perhaps modeled after the meal of Menelaus in the Odyssey. Rohde thinks also that the grace of an original picture has been blurred by the copyist in such scenes as the courtship of the three youths, and the old king's roguish familiar treatment of them; the discovery of the chest by the physician, Cerimon, and his precociously smart pupil; and the half-scurrilous, half-farcical manner of the bawd.

On the other hand, Riese points out (Vorrede, p. xv) that certain boorish witticisms may likely have been introduced into the narrative by the Latin author.

Here then are sufficient indications from every source that the romance was originally a work of sophistic rhetoric, though presumably of the simpler sort after the style of Xenophon.

Its scenery is the coast lands and islands of the Mediterranean; its pirates and other malefactors are the usual evil-doers of the sophistic romance; its motives are external, accidental and fatalistic. Under the hands of the Latin scribe the rhetorical romance was transformed into a Volksbuch, which accounts for its widespread popularity in the Middle Ages.1

1 The Latin text even in the oldest extant MSS. shows traces of provincialisms and of the influence of popular usage. This passage of a pseudo-classical romance into a Volksbuch is alluded to by Riese in his edition of 1893: "Inter quae sunt popularia quaedam, quae iam prorsus linguarum romanarum prae se ferunt imaginem, ut ablativi illi in matrimonio postulabant, populi homines, habet annos (gallice il y a des Ans), quid est hoc quod (gallice qu'est ce que), alia.

=

Before we leave this aspect of the romance it may be well to attend a moment to a conjecture which Prof. Erwin Rohde has developed with much ingenuity. He imagines that the Latin scribe broadened the trend of the story by an addition that is not particularly successful. In the first part of the romance Apollonius is introduced as a suitor for the hand of Antiochus' daughter. He is rebuffed and goes abroad. We should expect that his vain wooing would cause him some grief, but we have no word of sorrow or regret. On the contrary, he pledges his love to the first maiden who looks upon him with favor and compassion. King Antiochus and his daughter could be spared from the story altogether and the rest of the narrative not suffer in the least. It is true that King Antiochus reappears occasionally, and that at his shipwreck on the coast of Ethiopia Apollonius cries out that Neptune is more cruel than Antiochus. The wicked king dies by lightning and Apollonius claims his paternal kingdom (cum desiderassem properare ad patrium [meum] regnum percipiendum). He journeys into Egypt where he remains fourteen years. Why does he not go to Antioch? "After the loss of my dear wife I will not take possession of the kingdom," he says to his friends of Tarsus. It seems natural enough to them, but not to us. We know nothing of the kingdom for fourteen years, but when all the family are again united we learn that Apollonius took possession of the kingdom and that all was well. Prof. Rohde therefore concludes that Antiochus, his daughter and his kingdom, have nothing to do with the fable, and that the Antiochus episode had been first prefixed to the romance and then clumsily interwoven. Perhaps the Latin scribe was moved to introduce this prologue by the necessity of providing a motive sufficiently strong to send forth this luxurious king of Tyre a lonely ocean waif. The Greek poet might have found this motive, as in Xenophon, in an oracular response impelling and exhorting Apollonius to action, but the Christian poet could hardly accept the domination of human action by the oracle of a heathen dæmon. He must change the motive, and the one which he chose to substitute for the original he found freely developed in Greek myth and saga. The tale of the father who loves his own daughter, and who deters suitors by imposing upon them difficult tasks, is the story of Enomaus, who, loving his daughter Hippodamia, delays her marriage through chariot races with her suitors; Sithon who loving his daughter. Pallene slays her lovers in single combat; the father of Side loves