Ismenia Deceives Selvagia at the Festival of Minerva

Ismenia’s deception of Selvagia at the Festival of Minerva turns a ritual gathering into an intimate trap: by disguising herself as a shepherdess and pretending to be a man named Alanio, Ismenia wins Selvagia’s trust and affection, while concealing that the name belongs to her cousin, whom she herself loves. The episode makes disguise not merely a change of clothing but a means of redirecting desire and setting a larger romantic confusion in motion.

The Festival and Its Rules

Selvagia recounts that she lived in a province where shepherds and shepherdesses gathered at the Temple of Minerva for an annual festival. Its observances began the day before the main celebration. Shepherdesses and nymphs sang hymns in the temple, while shepherds competed outside in running, jumping, wrestling, and throwing the bar. Prizes included ivy wreaths, musical instruments, and staffs. The festivities therefore brought pastoral courtship and public custom together in a carefully ordered setting.

On the eve of the festival, Selvagia went to the temple with her friends, dressed in their best clothes. A company of shepherdesses arrived with male companions. The men entered only to pray and then withdrew, as local custom required, leaving the women and nymphs alone overnight to celebrate. This separation gives Ismenia room to perform her disguise without a male audience disrupting the scene, while the women’s vigil supplies a sheltered setting for the encounter.

The Disguise and the Courtship

The newcomers wore white veils that covered their faces, fastened to finely worked straw hats. One sat beside Selvagia and repeatedly watched her, lowering her eyes whenever Selvagia looked back. Selvagia became curious about her identity and, drawn to the stranger’s visible eyes, was already inclined to approach her. The stranger then took Selvagia’s hand and examined it. Selvagia answered with an offer of devotion, placing her heart and thoughts at the stranger’s service.

The stranger, who was Ismenia, answered in a low voice with apparent tenderness. She said that seeing Selvagia’s face had overcome her self-command and described this love between women as unusually enduring. Selvagia returned the declaration, promising that even death could not take away her intention to belong to the stranger. Their embraces and professions of love absorbed them so fully that Selvagia paid no attention to the songs and dances around them.

Selvagia pressed to learn the stranger’s name and see her face. Ismenia repeatedly evaded these requests, prolonging the uncertainty until after midnight. When Selvagia protested that she could not know whom she loved or how to find her again without an identity, Ismenia took her by the hand and led her to a secluded part of the temple. There she removed her veil and claimed to be a man, explaining that her female relatives had dressed her as a shepherdess for amusement. Her face seemed somewhat masculine to Selvagia, who accepted the claim and was too unsettled to answer at once.

Ismenia then represented the intimacy between them as genuine, despite the deception of her clothing, and gave the name Alanio. She said that the disguise had misled Selvagia, but that the words exchanged between them were sincere. Selvagia’s response reveals how completely she had entered the fiction: she regretted that the disguise had not been deliberately adopted for her sake, since that would have seemed proof of special devotion, yet affirmed that she had already surrendered her freedom to the supposed suitor. Ismenia sustained the performance with answers that seemed persuasive to Selvagia, and they talked until daybreak before parting with embraces, tears, and sighs.

The False Alanio and the Real One

As Ismenia left with her companions, Selvagia looked back to see whether she was being watched. She thought she saw Ismenia half laughing, but dismissed the impression as a possible mistake. Selvagia returned home carrying the stranger’s eyes, declarations, and embraces in her imagination, convinced that she had found a lover.

Her retrospective account then exposes the deception’s central device. Ismenia had a cousin actually named Alanio, whom she loved more than herself; the two resembled one another so closely in face and eyes that they might be mistaken for each other. Ismenia’s affection for her cousin was so prominent that, when Selvagia asked for a male name, Alanio was the first that came to mind. The name was therefore not an invention detached from Ismenia’s feelings: it inadvertently disclosed the person at the center of her own desire, while allowing Selvagia to mistake the performer for him.

Ismenia later told her cousin in detail what had happened at the temple, laughing with him about Selvagia’s belief that the disguised shepherdess was a man. Alanio concealed his reaction and drew out the story without letting anything pass unmentioned. The account says that he loved Ismenia, though less intensely than she loved him. Eight days later, he came to Selvagia’s village and positioned himself where she would see him as she passed with other young women on the way to a nearby fountain. Selvagia, recognizing the face and assuming that the lover from the temple had returned, signaled for him to approach. The episode thus ends not with the deception resolved between the women, but with the real Alanio entering the confusion created by Ismenia’s borrowed name.