Against such a background of plausible reality, the plot develops along three main lines of interest: love, adventure and religion. The story begins with the introduction of the radiant young hero and heroine of Syracuse when they fall in love at first sight at a festival of Aphrodite. Almost immediately they are married, but their ecstatic happiness is short, for Callirhoe’s many other suitors, angry at her choice, plot revenge. They make her husband jealous by false stories of a lover whom his bride favors, and, by staging a surreptitious admission to his house of a lover of Callirhoe’s maid, convince Chaereas that his wife is faithless. In passionate fury he dashes to his wife’s room and when Callirhoe overjoyed at his unexpected return rushes to meet him, he kicks her with such violence in the middle of her body that she falls down, to all appearance dead. Chaereas is tried for murder and pleads for his own condemnation, but is acquitted against his will by the appeal of Hermocrates. Callirhoe is now given a magnificent funeral and buried with much treasure. The heroine, however, who had only fainted, soon revives, but while she is bemoaning her sad fate, a band of pirates, led by Theron, breaks open the tomb, steals the treasure, kidnaps the girl, then sets sail with all speed for the east. At Miletus, Theron sells Callirhoe as a slave to Dionysius, a noble Ionian prince. He soon falls in love with his slave, but learning her story (except the fact that she was already married which Callirhoe omits) respects her tragic position and woos her with delicacy and consideration. Callirhoe, on finding that she is two months with child, decides to accept the advice of the maid Plangon and marry Dionysius to give her baby a father. Plangon assures Callirhoe that the child will be considered a premature seven months baby, and she secures from Dionysius a promise to bring up as his honored children any sons of the marriage. Book III tells how Chaereas found the tomb empty; how Theron was captured, forced to tell the truth by torture and crucified; how Chaereas and his bosom friend Polycharmus went on a warship to Miletus in search of Callirhoe but were captured and sold as slaves to Mithridates, satrap of Caria.