After many travels and adventures, in which Apollonius loses both his wife and his daughter and thinks them both dead, he is eventually reunited with his family through unlikely circumstances or intercession by gods.
In some English versions Apollonius is shipwrecked and becomes a tutor to a princess who falls in love with him, and the good king gradually discovers his daughter's wishes.
The major themes are the punishment of inappropriate lust—the incestuous king invariably comes to a bad end—and the ultimate rewards of love and fidelity.
[5] Some scholars hold that the riddles with which the king tests the hero in many versions may be a later addition:[6] ten derive from the c. fourth-century Latin riddle-collection attributed to Symphosius.
[9] 'Fifty to a hundred versions' of the story are known from antiquity into the early modern period, mostly European, including texts in English, Dutch, German, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, and Latin.
William Shakespeare and George Wilkins's play Pericles, Prince of Tyre was based in part on Gower's version, with the change of name probably inspired by Philip Sidney's Arcadia.