Dorida, Cintia and Polidora

Dorida, Cintia and Polidora are three nymphs whose appearance in the pastoral landscape turns a meeting around a spring into both a threatened encounter and a passage toward Felicia’s aid. Their music makes them witnesses to the shepherds’ sorrows; their captivity tests the honor they refuse to surrender; and their invitation to travel with them connects Sireno, Silvano and Selvagia to the wise woman of the Forest of Diana.

Identity and Setting

The three nymphs live in the Forest of Diana, where the wise Felicia is known for giving remedies to people afflicted by love. They explain that they have been visiting a female relative who lives beyond the Galician passes. On their return, they stop in a shaded valley to spend the hot part of the day among alders and laurels, taking up their instruments to imitate the stream’s sound. Their journey therefore brings them into the shepherds’ secluded country by chance, before their encounter becomes a consequential link between that pastoral world and Felicia’s household.

The narrative gives the trio a shared, striking appearance. They wear white garments embroidered with gold foliage; their hair is wound up and secured with strings of pearls, and each has a golden eagle holding a diamond above her brow. Seated among the flowers, they play together and sing with voices that seem to blend into a single celestial music. The description makes them at once distinct from the ordinary shepherds and fully present within the valley’s natural setting: their finery catches the light of the pastoral scene, while their coordinated performance gives the landscape a communal voice.

Music, Memory, and Sireno

The nymphs’ song draws Sireno, Silvano and Selvagia closer. Hidden among trees by a stream, the shepherds watch the three women sing a villancico about love’s passing contentments and their return. The song’s movement between loss and recurrence resonates with the shepherds’ own unsettled histories, especially Sireno’s grief over Diana. The nymphs do not yet know that their listeners are nearby, but their music makes them participants in a scene shaped by remembrance before they meet its central sufferer.

Dorida then identifies the place as the riverbank where Sireno and Diana parted. Cintia confirms that this is the celebrated site of their farewell, and Dorida explains how she knows what passed between the lovers: Celio had watched from an oak and recorded their conversation in verse, preserving it as it occurred. Her knowledge astonishes Sireno, who hears strangers speak of his private misfortune with unusual precision. In this moment, his past is no longer confined to his own memory; it has circulated through testimony and song, becoming part of the valley’s shared story. Dorida offers to sing the farewell, and her performance reopens Sireno’s grief so forcefully that Selvagia and Silvano can do little to console him.

Captivity and Defense of Honor

Soon after the performance, the nymphs walk onward across the meadow with their instruments. Three savages emerge from the brush, armed with bows and spiked clubs and dressed in imposing animal-skin armor. They accuse the women of having denied them love and claim that force will secure what their entreaties did not. Their words make clear that the attack is not an arbitrary ambush: it is an attempt to turn rejected desire into possession.

Dorida answers for the three. She condemns the attackers’ willingness to take up arms against women and insists that threats will not make them abandon their duty to their honor. The savages disregard her protest and bind her hands with a bowstring; they bind Cintia and Polidora in the same way. Sireno, Silvano and Selvagia, watching the assault, are appalled by the treatment of the women and resolve to intervene. The trio’s danger thus draws the shepherds into action, and their rescue establishes a bond grounded in a specific act of aid rather than in the exchange of songs and stories alone.

Alliance and Narrative Role

After the rescue, the nymphs acknowledge their debt to the shepherds. Polidora recognizes Sireno as the man once loved by Diana and now forgotten by her, while Dorida expresses pleasure at finding him and hopes to seek a remedy for his suffering. Sireno answers that no remedy can measure up to his pain. The exchange preserves the difference between the nymphs’ offer and the depth of his grief: their confidence in help does not erase what he has endured.

Polidora urges the shepherds to accompany the nymphs to Felicia, presenting her as especially able to relieve the troubles of love. She also addresses Sireno’s situation directly, observing that Diana’s present circumstances are unhappy and that the suffering between them has consequences for both. Sireno says that he cannot see a way to seek relief, but agrees that he and his companions will go with the nymphs. The shepherds entrust their flocks to others nearby, and the whole company sets out under the women’s guidance. Their departure makes the trio guides as well as rescued guests: they carry the narrative from a landscape of remembered heartbreak toward Felicia, without promising that Sireno’s pain has already been cured.