“Whoso doth it to you, do you it to him”

“Whoso doth it to you, do you it to him” is Dioneo’s closing maxim in the story of Pietro di Vinciolo, his wife, and a young man. Addressed to the women listening, it converts a comic, unresolved domestic encounter into a principle of reciprocal retaliation: if a wrong cannot be answered at once, the injured party should remember it and wait for an opportunity. The line’s force lies in its bluntness—and in the story’s refusal to say exactly how Pietro settles the matter.

The saying in its immediate context

Pietro comes upon his wife and the young man while they are sitting down to supper. His wife says they had just been about to eat when he arrived at an inconvenient moment. Pietro does not immediately punish or dismiss either of them; instead, he asks her to arrange supper for all three and promises to address the matter afterward. She has the table reset, brings out the meal she had prepared, and eats merrily with her husband and the young man.

The next morning, the young man is escorted back to the public place from which he had come. Dioneo says that he was not altogether certain which of the two men the young man had been more like that night, wife or husband. The uncertainty is part of the ending: Pietro’s promised resolution is not explained, because the narrator says it has escaped his memory. The maxim therefore follows a scene of accommodation whose real terms remain hidden, rather than a clearly narrated act of revenge.

Retaliation, delay, and comic uncertainty

Dioneo directs the advice to the women: they should treat others as they have been treated. His qualification makes the maxim more than an instruction to answer an injury immediately. If the opportunity is not at hand, the wronged person should keep the matter in mind until it is. In the setting of Pietro’s story, this counsel makes the wife’s apparently cheerful participation in supper difficult to read as a final surrender; the narrator has left open what happens between the meal and the young man’s return the next morning.

The line’s comic edge comes from the gap between its confident rule and the missing account of Pietro’s solution. Dioneo offers the audience a memorable formula, but withholds the very action that might show how it applies. The unresolved episode lets the maxim serve as a pointed lesson in retaliation without converting the story into a fully specified record of who repaid whom, or how.

A culture of the apt retort

The phrase belongs to a wider interest in quick speech as a means of answering a slight. In the Day Six discussion of witty sayings, Lauretta distinguishes a well-judged retort from an outright affront: a jest should bite like a sheep, not like a dog. She also observes that a person answering a bite with a bite is not to be judged as though the exchange had begun without provocation. Dioneo’s maxim pushes that reciprocal logic beyond verbal sparring and into conduct: the reply may be deferred, but the memory of the original injury remains.

Other episodes show how a timely answer can reverse who holds the advantage. At a public celebration on Saint John’s Day, the bishop of Florence asks Nonna de’ Pulci whether she thinks she could win over the marshal Dego della Ratta. Dego had lain with a married woman against her will after her miserly husband accepted counterfeit money as payment. Nonna answers that she would want good money for such a conquest. Her reply touches both men on the spot: they leave ashamed and silent. Like Dioneo’s maxim, her retort makes the response answer the character of the original offense, while its public delivery turns shame back upon those who presumed to impose it.

Words that change the balance

Guglielmo Borsiere’s exchange with Ermino de’ Grimaldi offers a related, though less retaliatory, instance of speech producing a change. When Ermino asks what he might have painted in his new house that no one had ever seen, Guglielmo proposes Liberality. The rebuke shames Ermino so deeply that, from then on, he becomes known as Genoa’s most liberal and courteous gentleman. Where Dioneo’s saying recommends remembering an injury until it can be repaid, Guglielmo’s answer names the virtue absent from his host and helps bring about a reversal in character.

Guido Cavalcanti’s encounter with Messer Betto Brunelleschi’s company gives the verbal reversal a different shape. Hemmed in among the tombs near San Giovanni, Guido tells his tormentors that they may speak to him in their own house, then springs over a tomb and escapes. Betto recognizes the rebuke: the tombs are houses of the dead, and Guido has compared his pursuers with the ignorant dead beside the learned. Across these episodes, speech does not merely describe an affront; it can return it, expose it, or alter the relation between the speaker and the person addressed. Dioneo’s phrase distills that recurring comic mechanism into a compact rule of remembered reciprocity.