Seeing Tongues, Hearing Scripts, 299–320 Fixity and Fluidity in Apollonius of Tyre S TELIOS P ANAYOTAKIS University of Crete To sing a song that old was sung From ashes ancient Gower is come, Assuming man’s infirmities, To glad your ears and please your eyes. It hath been sung at festivals, On ember-eves and holy-ales; And lords and ladies in their lives Have read it for restoratives. The purchase is to make men glorious; Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius. (Shakesp. Pericl. I.Prol.1–10) Anonymous authorship, textual fluidity, and an episodic narrative structure are distinctive features that the Latin Historia Apollonii regis Tyri (The Story of Apollonius, king of Tyre; hereafter, Apollonius of Tyre) shares with works of ancient Greek ‘popular’ literature such as The Alexander Romance. As Hansen explains, ‘literature of this sort stands midway between conventional literature, in which texts ideally possess a single, unvarying form, and oral narrative such as myth, legend, and folktale, in which certain kinds of varia- tion, including the development of ecotypes, or local recensions, are the norm’. 1 The fascinating adventures of Apollonius survive in diverging ver- sions, the earliest of which are known as Recensions A and B; the examina- tion of both the relationship between these families of manuscripts and the interrelationships between manuscripts within each recension, shows that copyists, who do not mechanically reproduce the text, take the liberty to ————— 1 Hansen 1998, xxi.