FOR centuries readers of the influential Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri had been misconceiving its style and composition. The reason? In retrospect, simple: the tale had been edited under false premises. It had been edited as if the finished product might possess a single uniformity; as if, in effect, a motley pack of MSS whose line of division is recensional might somehow impart, through this choice here and that choice there, the tale's Urform. As for the aforementioned readers, uel duo uel nemo, I suspect, allowed his eye to stray into the large and amorphous notes then passing for an apparatus criticus. If he did he found profusion and confusion; he found a bewildering tangle of lectiones, uariationes, intrusa, extrusa, interpolationes-call them what you will. Such a tangle, on intuition perhaps, should not have been trimmed into a single recension; but trimmed it was and, in default of better material(s), trimmed it almost had to be. That is why even A. Riese's edition of 1871 was doomed to be, from its birth and conception, useless, or nearly so, and pernicious. There followed, in 1888, an edition by M. Ring. Ring was no critic; and if his edition, qua edition, was of little moment, far otherwise was the MS (P) he brought to light. In the decade prior Riese had been working in comparative darkness. He had based his text on a MS (A) which, estimable though it was, contained scarcely a third of the tale. Its losses he was therefore obliged to repair from other MSS, promiscuously or even eclectically-yet in the end disastrously. Against this backdrop the new MS, once identified as A's younger brother, was a boon and a blessing. And no wonder: by containing the full tale, it repaired A's losses; by serving as a check, it served to settle (or unsettle) A's readings; and by being related to A, by that alone, it taught how unworthy MSS once assumed related were of that assumption. What more? It changed the basis of the text and, with it, its format: AP would now form one recension, other MSS another, and others still others. In the wake of Ring's discovery Riese issued, in 1893, a second and vastly different edition. "Ex his duobus libris," claims he of AP, "iam nunc Apollonium genuinum edere mihi licet, quod olim fieri non poterat nisi in eis partibus, quae libro A extant" (praef., p. iv). On the superiority of AP, "quos libros maxime omnium ad genuinam libelli formam accedere ... apparet," see his praefatio for details. (The sanguine talk of Apollonius genuinus, of course, never mind; consider it the ghost of "attainable Urform" trying to repossess its erstwhile victim.) In this edition, beneath the text