The two faces of the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri
translation, paganism and Christianization
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14195/1984-249X_36_06Keywords:
Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, Hellenistic novel, ideological translation, Christianization, rewritingAbstract
The Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, an anonymous romance of late antique origin, survives in two Latin recensions”RA and RB”that present notable linguistic, stylistic, and ideological differences. Modern criticism (Kortekaas, 2007; Schmeling, 1988; Archibald, 1991; Panayotakis, 2012) maintains that both derive from a lost Greek original, probably composed between the second and third centuries AD, a period of transition between the pagan and Christian worlds. This article proposes a comparative reading of the two recensions as competing translations of the same narrative model, interpreting their variations not only as phenomena of textual transmission but as evidence of a process of ideological translation. After discussing the historical and philological context of the work and outlining the profile of each recension, a narrative synthesis is presented to situate the reader, followed by a comparative analysis of twenty-two central excerpts. In these passages, the RB reveals a systematic pattern of intervention: it softens morally sensitive passages, replaces pagan formulas with Christian vocabulary, elevates the style, and reformulates the plot according to values ‹‹of piety, providence, and chastity. By Christianizing the Hellenistic romance and giving it hagiographic overtones, the RB transforms the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri into a privileged document of the cultural and spiritual transformation of the late antique Mediterranean.
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