Lydia and Pyrrhus’s pear-tree trick

Lydia and Pyrrhus’s pear-tree trick turns a wife’s pursuit of her husband’s trusted servant into a compact demonstration of how ingenuity can make betrayal look like proof of innocence. Lydia first overcomes Pyrrhus’s resistance through three costly demonstrations of commitment, then helps him persuade Nicostratus that an affair he has witnessed is only an illusion caused by a tree. The hawk, the beard, the tooth, and finally the felled pear tree mark successive stages in a deception that ends not with discovery, but with the husband helping to erase its apparent evidence.

Background and the First Refusal

In Argos, Lydia is the high-spirited and beautiful wife of the wealthy nobleman Nicostratus, whose love of hunting fills his household with servants, hounds, and hawks. Pyrrhus, a handsome, capable young servant, is especially favored and trusted by his master. Lydia falls passionately in love with him, but at first he appears not to notice her feeling. She confides in her chamberwoman Lusca and asks her to carry a private invitation to Pyrrhus, explaining that the disparity in age between herself and Nicostratus leaves her dissatisfied and that she has resolved to seek pleasure with Pyrrhus.

Pyrrhus’s first response is an emphatic refusal. He says he cannot believe Lydia truly sent the message and, even if she did, would not commit an outrage against the master who honors and trusts him. Lusca returns to Lydia with his answer, and Lydia is devastated. Rather than abandon the plan, she sends Lusca back. On this second approach, the chamberwoman presses Pyrrhus with arguments that combine pity for Lydia, the promise of pleasure and material advantage, and a challenge to the loyalty he claims to owe Nicostratus. She argues that servants need not observe the same fidelity as friends and kin, and invokes the possibility that a master would not show equivalent restraint if the positions were reversed.

Three Proofs of Lydia’s Resolve

Pyrrhus remains wary. Because Nicostratus entrusts him with his affairs, he suspects that the proposal may be a test devised with his master’s knowledge. He sets three conditions for Lydia: she must kill Nicostratus’s prized hawk in his presence, send Pyrrhus a lock of her husband’s beard, and send him one of his teeth. These demands turn the affair from a secret invitation into a trial of Lydia’s nerve and ingenuity. She accepts them, and promises, beyond fulfilling the conditions, to enjoy Pyrrhus in Nicostratus’s presence while making her husband believe nothing has happened.

The hawk is the first proof. At a dinner for gentlemen, Lydia enters richly dressed in green samite and goes to the perch where Nicostratus keeps the bird. She releases it as though to take it on her hand, then strikes it against the wall and kills it. To the assembled guests, she offers a plausible grievance: Nicostratus’s daily rides after his hawk leave her alone in bed, so she has taken revenge on the bird that occupies his attention. The guests accept this explanation, and Nicostratus himself laughs along with them rather than suspecting a lover’s signal. Pyrrhus, watching the scene, recognizes that Lydia has begun to keep her promise.

The second proof comes during Lydia’s playful time with her husband. When Nicostratus pulls her hair, she seizes a lock of his beard and tugs it out, keeping the hair and sending it to Pyrrhus. To complete the third condition, she invents an ailment that makes the extraction look like treatment. She persuades Nicostratus that his breath smells and that a rotten tooth is the cause. Rather than summon a surgeon, she insists that she can remove it herself, promising that she can stop if he suffers too much. With Lusca holding him, Lydia uses pincers to pull out a sound tooth. She then shows him a rotten tooth she had prepared, and Nicostratus accepts it as the one removed from his mouth. Lydia sends the real tooth to Pyrrhus, who is now convinced of her determination and agrees to comply with her wishes.

The Apparent Vision in the Pear Tree

Lydia next arranges a meeting in the garden, using a pretended illness to bring Nicostratus and Pyrrhus to her side. They support her as she walks to a grassy spot beneath a pear tree. Once there, Lydia asks Pyrrhus to climb the tree and throw down pears. From among the branches, he begins to accuse them of embracing and to ask how they can behave so shamelessly in front of him. Lydia and Nicostratus deny that anything is happening. Pyrrhus insists that he sees them together; Nicostratus concludes that the young man must be dreaming or mistaken.

At Pyrrhus’s urging, Nicostratus climbs the tree to test the supposed enchantment for himself. As soon as he reaches the top, Lydia and Pyrrhus embrace below. Nicostratus cries out at what he sees, but when he descends, the lovers are seated apart in the places where he left them. The contradiction gives Pyrrhus and Lydia an explanation to exploit: if Nicostratus’s sight on the tree is unreliable, Pyrrhus’s accusation must be unreliable too. Pyrrhus presents the husband’s own experience as evidence that the tree causes false appearances, and argues that an honorable wife would not commit adultery before her husband’s eyes. Lydia reinforces the story by feigning outrage that Nicostratus could suspect her, while implying that a woman intent on an affair would choose a more private place.

The Tree Is Cut Down, the Secret Remains

Nicostratus gives up his accusation and accepts the tree as the source of the deception. Lydia then turns his credulity into the final act of the ruse: she calls the tree an enemy to her honor and urges Pyrrhus to fetch an axe. Pyrrhus cuts it down, physically destroying the object to which they have attributed the false vision. Lydia declares her anger past now that the supposed enemy is felled, and graciously forgives her husband for having doubted her. Nicostratus, having been made to treat what he saw as a marvel of the tree rather than evidence of betrayal, returns with Lydia and Pyrrhus to the palace.

The ending confirms that the deception has not merely secured a single encounter. The lovers continue their affair afterward, with greater ease, while Nicostratus remains fooled. The story’s reversals depend on a deliberate contrast between what the husband sees and what he can be persuaded to believe: the hawk’s death becomes a joke, the stolen tooth becomes a cure, and the lovers’ embrace becomes an optical marvel. In the pear-tree scene, Nicostratus’s own attempt to verify the evidence supplies the occasion for the lovers to act openly and then deny what he has witnessed. The final blow of the axe thus falls on the tree, not on the affair it was made to conceal.