This summary quite faithfully represents the statements of the divine Hermes; but Euripides knows as well as we do that gods do not walk the earth and that children are not miraculously wafted through the air. The prologue satisfies convention: the play itself is realistic and one of the chief characters is a woman of whom the prologue tells us nothing. The real plot, as opposed to the idealistic version, is as follows:—the facts are put down crudely instead of being conveyed by subtle hints and innuendo as they are in the Greek. A young Athenian girl, Creüsa, wandering one day alone in the fields is attacked by a brutal satyr. He drags her into a cave, violates her and then makes his escape. She faints, and on awakening imagines that her assailant, who has disappeared as suddenly as he came, was a being from another world: she had seen him in the full sunlight; he is the sun-god Apollo. She tells no one of her adventure, conceals her condition and when her time comes, makes her way alone to the same cave. The child is born, wrapped by the girl mother in a piece of cloth, and placed, together with a golden bracelet as token, in a wicker basket. Then he is abandoned, and of his fate we hear no more. About the same time at Delphi, in one of those periods of promiscuous sexual intercourse allowed and encouraged by temple ritual, one of the Delphian women becomes a mother, by a roving soldier of fortune named Xuthus. The latter leaves Delphi, ignorant of his paternity, and the woman is soon after appointed priestess of the temple. Her child, Ion, ostensibly a foundling, is reared within the temple precinct and regards the priestess as his foster mother. Meanwhile, the soldier Xuthus makes his way to Athens and marries Creüsa. They have no children, and come to Delphi to ask advice of the oracle. The priestess recognises Xuthus as the father of her son, and so arranges matters—remaining herself unseen—that after a conversation with the boy he acknowledges him as his child, the result of the former hasty connexion.