Pericles had not been many months married to Thaisa, before he received intelligence that his enemy Antiochus was dead; and that his subjects of Tyre, impatient of his long absence, threatened to revolt, and talked of placing Hellicanus upon his vacant throne.  This news came from Hellicanus himself, who being a loyal subject to his royal master, would not accept of the high dignity offered him, but sent to let Pericles know their intentions, that he might return home and resume his lawful right.  It was matter of great surprise and joy to Symonides, to find that his son-in-law (the obscure knight) was the renowned prince of Tyre; yet again he regretted that he was not the private gentleman he supposed him to be, seeing that he must now part both with his admired son-in-law and his beloved daughter, whom he feared to trust to the perils of the sea, because Thaisa was with child; and Pericles himself wished her to remain with her father till after her confinement, but the poor lady so earnestly desired to go with her husband, that at last they consented, hoping she would reach Tyre before she was brought to-bed.

The sea was no friendly element to unhappy Pericles, for long before they reached Tyre another dreadful tempest arose, which so terrified Thaisa that she was taken ill, and in a short space of time her nurse Lychorida came to Pericles with a little child in her arms, to tell the prince the sad tidings that his wife died the moment her little babe was born.  She held the babe towards its father, saying, “Here is a thing too young for such a place.  This is the child of your dead queen.”  No tongue can tell the dreadful sufferings of Pericles when he heard his wife was dead.  As soon as he could speak, he said, “O you gods, why do you make us love your goodly gifts, and then snatch those gifts away?” “Patience, good sir,” said Lychorida, “here is all that is left alive of our dead queen, a little daughter, and for your child’s sake be more manly.  Patience, good sir, even for the sake of this precious charge.”  Pericles took the new-born infant in his arms, and he said to the little babe, “Now may your life be mild, for a more blusterous birth had never babe!  May your condition be mild and gentle, for you have had the rudest welcome that ever prince’s child did meet with!  May that which follows be happy, for you have had as chiding a nativity as fire, air, water, earth, and heaven, could make, to herald you from the womb!  Even at the first, your loss,” meaning in the death of her mother, “is more than all the joys which you shall find upon this earth, to which you are come a new visitor, shall be able to recompence.”