beautiful youth. Xanthippe thinks this means that Satan will win Polyxena unless she is immediately baptized. But Polyxena's initial attempts to secure baptism fail and she is abducted in the night by an enemy of Polyxena's boyfriend and put on a ship to Babylonia. The winds, however, force the ship to approach one bearing the apostle Peter, who had been directed by a vision. But demons prevent them meeting. The ship, instead, goes off course to Greece, where the apostle Philip has come. Having been directed by a vision, Philip rescues Polyxena. When his thirty servants, armed with a cross, go to meet the abductor's army of 8,000, they slay 5,000 soldiers before the remainder flee. But Polyxena has meanwhile fled in fear. She ends up lost and unintentionally walks into the empty den of a lioness. When the lioness returns, Polyxena begs the animal not to eat her before she is baptized. So the lioness leads her east out of the woods to a road and then goes back to her den. The apostle Andrew coincidentally walks past and Polyxena asks for baptism. So they find a well and rescue Rebecca, a Jewish slave held captive there. Then both are baptized when the lioness returns and asks Andrew to perform the task. Later, after Andrew departs, the women briefly gain the company of an ordinary Christian driving a cart but lose it when they are abducted by a passing prefect. Rebecca later manages to escape and flee to an old woman's house (and disappears from the story). Meanwhile, Polyxena begs the prefect's servants to preserve her virginity; so they tell the prefect that she is ill. The prefect's son, a convert to Christianity after witnessing Paul's effect on Thecla, disguises her in his clothing and sends her to the shore to catch a ship. But a villainous servant overhears and reports them. They are captured and thrown to a lioness in the arena. But the lioness turns out to be the one previously encountered and does no harm. As a result, the entire city takes this to be proof of the truth of Christianity and so convert en-masse. The narrator reveals himself as Onesimus, a sailor who has received a vision telling him to go to a certain part of Greece and pick up both Polyxena and the prefect's son. However, after his arrival, a storm keeps everyone there