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In the [[prologue]] speech the divinity has exposed how years before the four-year-old Philumene, together with her nurse and the slave Dromon, was kidnapped by pirates from her father's estate on the coast of [[Attica]] and sold at [[Mylasa]] in [[Caria]] to a wealthy Sicyonian named Hegemon.
The action probably started with a conversation between Theron and his love interest Malthake, during which the audience learns that Theron is the parasite of Stratophanes, a mercenary soldier who has lately arrived from a successful campaign in Asia Minor. In the first acts Stratophanes starts his search for a young slave girl who had previously been in his family's custody. Belonging to his late Sicyonian father Hegemon, the girl was educated like a lady and Stratophanes fell in love with her, but now, due to an important law suit lost by his father, her fate is uncertain as the
Towards the end of act three, however, Stratophanes is informed by his slave Pyrrhias that his mother has passed away in Sicyon revealing on her dying bed that he was not her natural son, but adopted from an Athenian. When the slave also brings documents to prove his master's descent, Stratophanes exclaims: "At first I thought I too was a Sicyonian; but here is this man who now brings me my mother's testament and the proofs of my true birth. And I myself believe - if I am to infer from what is written here and to credit it - that I too am your fellow-citizen. Do not yet deprive me of my hope; but if I too am proved to be a fellow citizen of the girl whom I preserved for her father, allow me to ask him for her and to get her. And let none of my antagonists get the girl into his power before he is revealed."<ref>Translation by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Menander's Sikyonios, (1966), p.142.</ref>
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