[1] Scholars have placed him in the 2nd century, but his age was unknown even to Photius I, Patriarch of Constantinople, who wrote a synopsis of the romance.
Scholars have tended to take it as a given that Lucian had Diogenes' work principally in mind when he wrote his celebrated parody, A True Story.
[3] The current knowledge of the novel's content is from Photios, who left a summary in his Myriobiblos,[4] a lengthy volume advising his idle brother, Tarasios, which books to read.
Even though Photios praises the work in high tones, both for its style clarity and its plot credibility, his summary of the content creates a confusing impression, mainly because of the multiple nested levels of narration.
The novel begins in the outermost layer, where the author introduces a Roman named Faustinus, who travels the world searching for rare books to give to his bibliophile sister, Isidora.
It was written by Balagros, a Greek soldier in the Somatophylakes of Alexander the Great, to his wife Phila, the eldest daughter of Antipater; the couple are genuine historical figures incorporated into the novel.
In the narrative of Derkyllis, she and Mantinias, children of Mnasion, are driven from their home by the schemes of the novel's villain, an Egyptian priest named Paapis.
Believing that they have murdered their parents, Derkyllis and Mantinias flee in grief, first arriving at Rhodes and Crete, then continuing onto the lands of the Tyrrhenians and the Cimmerians.
Deep in the land of barbarians and at the edge of the known world, Derkyllis finds the entrance to Hades and meets a deceased servant named Myrto, who teaches her secrets of the Underworld.
Astraios explains how, during a journey, Mnesarchus, a stepfather of Pythagoras, noticed the child's exceptional abilities as he watched him lying under a white poplar, looking at the sun without blinking.
Finally, Androcles adopted the boy, whom he named Astraios, and raised him with his biological sons Eunostos, Tyrrhenos, and Pythagoras.
This detour in the story completed, the existing members of the Derkyllis, Keryllos, and Astraios group arrive in Iberia, first into a city whose inhabitants are blind during daytime, although they can see at night.
With the help of a flute, Astraios harms their enemies, the bloodthirsty and stupid Celts, from whom the team flees by changing their horses' colors, escaping to Akytania.
In the court of the tyrant they are confronted by Paapis, the Egyptian villain, but Derkyllis, to her delight, also meets her lost brother Mantinias.
Subsequently, the siblings' companion, Azulis, and the Arcadian travelers, Deinias and Demochares, begin to study Paapis' books of magic.
They search for the means to relieve Derkyllis and Mantinias from the vampire-like curse that haunts them, hoping as well to help the parents of the two, who, back in Tyros, apparently suffer from a similar condition of living death.
Surviving traditional texts like the Aethiopica of Heliodorus of Emesa, compared to their corresponding summaries of Photios in Myriobiblos, add a word of caution.
No solid conclusions are possible from the scanty, confused, and sometimes difficult-to-grasp summary Photios gave, originally only meant as an incentive for his idle brother, Tarasios, to read the novel.