Pyrrhus

Pyrrhus, a trusted servant in Nicostratus’s household, becomes the lover Lydia pursues and the accomplice who helps her deceive her husband. In Pamfilo’s tale, his change from scrupulous refusal to calculated participation turns the household’s bonds of service and trust into instruments of secrecy: first he worries that Lydia’s invitation may be a test of his loyalty; later he makes Nicostratus doubt what he has seen with his own eyes.

Identity and Position

Pyrrhus is a young man in Nicostratus’s service, distinguished as sprightly, well-bred, and handsome, and capable in whatever he undertakes. Nicostratus loves and trusts him above his other servants, giving their relationship a closeness that makes Pyrrhus’s eventual affair more than a private transgression. The man who will help deceive his master begins from an evident awareness of the obligation he owes him.

Lydia, Nicostratus’s wife, falls deeply in love with Pyrrhus. She confides her desire to her trusted chamberwoman, Lusca, explaining that her elderly husband cannot satisfy her and asking Lusca to approach the young man on her behalf. At first, however, Lydia’s passion is hers alone: Pyrrhus appears not to have noticed it, or not to have welcomed it.

Refusal and Reconsideration

When Lusca first conveys Lydia’s request, Pyrrhus is astonished. He suspects that his master’s wife may have sent the message to test him, and insists that Nicostratus has shown him too much honor for him to commit such an injury. His response makes loyalty an active choice, not merely a rule he repeats: he rejects an opportunity that Lydia presents as desirable and refuses to speak further of it.

Lydia does not abandon her pursuit. On a second approach, Lusca presses Pyrrhus with arguments about the lady’s beauty and rank, the pleasures and material advantages he might gain, and the unequal obligations between master and servant. She asks him to imagine whether Nicostratus would show comparable restraint if he desired a woman belonging to Pyrrhus’s family. Her case recasts fidelity as a one-sided demand imposed on servants, and opportunity as a favor of fortune that should not be refused.

Pyrrhus turns the question of desire into a demand for proof. He is willing to submit to Lydia’s wishes, he tells Lusca, if she can show that the invitation is genuine rather than a test arranged with Nicostratus. He sets three conditions: Lydia must kill Nicostratus’s prized hawk in his presence, send Pyrrhus a lock of her husband’s beard, and provide one of his teeth. The requests are not just tokens of affection. Each would demonstrate that Lydia is prepared to risk discovery and defy her husband, where Pyrrhus’s first response had been governed by the possibility that Nicostratus himself was behind the approach.

Proof of Lydia’s Resolve

Lusca and Lydia find the conditions difficult, but Lydia agrees to fulfill them. At a dinner Nicostratus gives for several gentlemen, she appears richly dressed and, before the guests and Pyrrhus, releases the hawk from its perch only to seize it by its jesses and dash it against the wall. Nicostratus cries out at the loss. The public, deliberate destruction of the bird makes Lydia’s defiance unmistakable to Pyrrhus, even as the gathering witnesses an act whose full purpose remains concealed from them.

Lydia also secures one of Nicostratus’s teeth by arranging to remove it herself. She tells him it is rotten and dangerous to leave in his mouth, then persuades him to dismiss everyone except Lusca. With Nicostratus held by the chamberwoman, Lydia pulls out a tooth by force. She keeps the tooth she has removed, shows him a decayed one she had ready, and lets him believe that the painful procedure has cured him. She then sends the extracted tooth to Pyrrhus. Receiving it, he is at last convinced of her love and declares himself ready to do her pleasure. What had been a test of Lydia’s sincerity has also made her husband’s body a source of evidence exchanged between the lovers.

The Pear-Tree Deception

Lydia next stages a meeting in the garden. Pretending to be unwell, she asks Nicostratus and Pyrrhus to help her outside; they support her on either side and set her down beneath a fine pear tree. After they have sat for a while, she asks Pyrrhus to climb up and throw down some pears. Once he is in the tree, he pretends to see Lydia and Nicostratus making love below. He calls down in feigned indignation, asking whether Nicostratus is ashamed to behave so before him, while the couple remain seated apart.

Nicostratus thinks Pyrrhus must be dreaming. Pyrrhus persists, describing what he claims to have seen, until Nicostratus decides to climb the tree himself to discover whether it is enchanted. The moment he reaches the top, Lydia and Pyrrhus embrace. Nicostratus cries out at what he witnesses; the lovers answer that they are sitting where they were before. When Nicostratus descends, he sees them again in their original positions. The trick depends on making direct observation appear unstable: the husband’s own brief experience on the tree becomes the explanation for the lovers’ openly staged denial.

Trust Turned into Complicity

Pyrrhus does more than take Lydia’s offer after his doubts have been satisfied. He constructs the means by which she can act in Nicostratus’s presence and then persuade him to disbelieve the evidence. When Nicostratus rails at the pair, Pyrrhus argues that the pear tree must have deceived his sight, using the husband’s supposed vision in the tree to support his own false account. He adds that Lydia, reputedly so virtuous and discreet, could not plausibly have committed such an act before her husband’s eyes. Nicostratus accepts the explanation and turns from accusation to wonder at the tree’s apparent power.

The reversal sharpens Pyrrhus’s role in the household. At first, Nicostratus’s trust helps explain why Pyrrhus fears betraying him; once persuaded, Pyrrhus uses that very intimacy and authority as cover. He supplies an appearance of loyalty while helping Lydia secure privacy and escape reproach. The episode thus carries his movement from refusal to complicity through concrete tests—the dead hawk, the extracted tooth, and the staged sight beneath the pear tree—rather than presenting his surrender as an unexplained change of heart.