Lydia—Nicostratus

Lydia’s relationship with Nicostratus is the tale’s central contrast between a husband’s trust and a wife’s carefully managed deception. While Nicostratus sees himself as the master of a well-ordered household and trusts Pyrrhus above his other servants, Lydia secretly loves Pyrrhus and plots their meetings. Her most audacious stratagem makes Nicostratus witness the lovers together, then persuade himself that his own eyes have lied; the marriage survives, but its apparent harmony becomes the condition that protects her affair.

Marriage and Household

In Argos, Nicostratus is a wealthy nobleman nearing old age who enjoys hunting and keeps servants, hounds, and hawks. Lydia, his young and high-spirited wife, is beautiful and of distinguished family. Within this household, Pyrrhus occupies a privileged position: a handsome, capable young servant whom Nicostratus loves and trusts more than the others. That trust gives Pyrrhus both access to the couple’s domestic world and a particularly dangerous role in Lydia’s desire.

Lydia’s account of the marriage turns on the difference between her age and her husband’s. She tells Lusca, her trusted chamberwoman, that Nicostratus is too old to satisfy the desires she shares with other women. She presents her passion for Pyrrhus as so consuming that she fears she will die if she cannot meet him. The affair is therefore not an accidental lapse: Lydia decides to seek pleasure outside her marriage and uses Lusca to carry her proposal to the man she wants.

Desire and the Three Tests

Pyrrhus initially rejects the approach. He is astonished, suspects that Lydia may be testing him, and insists that accepting her would dishonor the master who has treated him so generously. His refusal makes the conflict explicit: loyalty to Nicostratus stands between Lydia’s desire and its fulfillment. Lydia does not abandon her plan. She sends Lusca back, determined to overcome Pyrrhus’s resistance, and he eventually sets three conditions by which she must prove her commitment: she must kill Nicostratus’s cherished hawk, pull out a lock of his beard, and remove one of his teeth. She must also perform these acts in circumstances that will let her lover see her resolve.

Lydia fulfills the tests by manipulating ordinary household scenes. At a dinner attended by gentlemen, she releases the hawk from its perch and kills it against a wall. She explains the act as revenge for the time Nicostratus gives to hunting rather than to his wife; the guests take her explanation as a joke, and Nicostratus himself laughs along. Later, while playfully tugging at her husband’s hair, she pulls out a lock of his beard and secretly sends it to Pyrrhus. For the final test, she persuades Nicostratus that a rotten tooth is making his breath offensive, then draws a healthy tooth herself and substitutes a decayed one she has prepared. Each demonstration costs Nicostratus something he values or suffers, while appearing to him as a domestic prank or a service performed for his benefit.

The Pear Tree and the Reversal of Sight

Having satisfied Pyrrhus’s demands, Lydia arranges a more perilous proof. Pretending to be unwell, she asks Nicostratus and Pyrrhus to help her into the garden. At the foot of a pear tree, she asks Pyrrhus to climb up and throw down fruit. From the branches he pretends to see Lydia and Nicostratus making love, although they remain seated apart. He protests that Nicostratus is betraying his wife, while Lydia acts bewildered by the accusation. Nicostratus first dismisses Pyrrhus’s report as a dream, then climbs up himself to test what the tree allows a person to see.

The moment Nicostratus reaches the top, Lydia and Pyrrhus embrace. He calls down in outrage, but when he descends, the lovers are back where they had been, and he cannot make his experience agree with the scene before him. Pyrrhus turns that contradiction into an argument: if Nicostratus must believe that the tree deceived him, he should accept the same explanation for Pyrrhus’s apparent vision. The husband’s own disbelief in the servant’s accusation thus becomes the means by which he is made to discount the evidence he has just witnessed. The trick does not erase the adultery; it makes the truth appear less credible than Nicostratus’s trust in his wife.

The Marriage After the Deception

Pyrrhus fetches an axe, and Nicostratus cuts down the tree he suspects of enchantment. Lydia declares that her anger has passed now that the enemy of her honor has been overthrown, and she forgives her husband after he begs her pardon. Her language turns the scene inside out: the man who has caught her with her lover is recast as the one who wronged her by doubting her. Nicostratus accepts the reconciliation and returns to the palace with Lydia and Pyrrhus.

The ending makes clear that the apparent restoration of the marriage is not a return to fidelity. Lydia and Pyrrhus continue their meetings, now more comfortably, while Nicostratus remains deceived. The relationship’s outcome depends not on the affair being concealed from his senses, but on his being maneuvered into rejecting what those senses tell him. Nicostratus’s trust in Pyrrhus, his credulity about Lydia, and his willingness to blame the tree combine to protect the lovers. Their household remains outwardly intact, but its order has been inverted: the husband’s confidence becomes the lovers’ cover, and Lydia’s performance of injured virtue secures the freedom to continue the affair.