What it is
An adventure romance from late antiquity.
The Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri is an anonymous Latin romance of late antiquity. Apollonius’s journey runs from Tyre and Antioch to Tarsus, Cyrene, Mytilene and Ephesus, through storms, royal courts, pirates, disguises and mistaken deaths.
What the Latin is like
Direct, narrative and full of dialogue.
The Latin is direct and strongly narrative, with plenty of dialogue and vocabulary that repeats, so it gets easier as you go. A few poems, inscriptions and riddles are harder than the story around them. On LC’s difficulty scale it scores 4.9 (Intermediate).
In the reader
All fifty-one chapters, with every word defined.
The reader has chapters I–LI from Alexander Riese’s 1871 Teubner edition, collated page by page against the printed edition, about 10,400 words. Display text is macronized.
Read next
Passio Perpetuae in Latin → · Ad Alpes in Latin →
Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis
A very different late-antique voice: a young woman’s prison narrative.
Ad Alpes · Reader I
Another story-driven reader, a Roman family’s journey told in chapters.