Solomon

In the Ninth Day’s final tale, Solomon’s celebrated wisdom takes the form of two remarkably brief answers, each leaving its petitioner to discover what the advice means in practice. Melisso learns that generosity without genuine affection cannot win love; Giosefo takes the directions to Goosebridge as a lesson in forceful rule over his wife. Solomon’s role is therefore both that of a sage whose counsel reaches beyond its few words and the center of a tale whose comic resolution carries a troublingly punitive edge.

Identity and Reputation

The tale introduces Solomon as a king whose miraculous wisdom is renowned almost throughout the world. His liberality is equally famous: people from distant places come to seek his advice in their most urgent difficulties, and he receives the two young travelers through the introduction of one of his barons. His reputation establishes the expectation that even a terse response will contain useful knowledge, though the petitioners initially fail to recognize it.

Solomon does not appear as a fully developed personality with a narrated history. The story presents him through his public authority, his reputation for wisdom, and the contrast between the simplicity of his answers and the complexity of the problems brought before him.

The Petitioners and Their Problems

Melisso, a wealthy gentleman from Lajazzo, is traveling toward Jerusalem because he cannot understand why he has failed to win anyone’s affection. He spends freely to keep open house and entertain his fellow townsmen, yet remains unloved. On the road out of Antioch he meets Giosefo, who is bound for the same destination. Giosefo seeks advice about his wife, whom he regards as so unruly that neither prayers nor gentle appeals have changed her conduct.

Their paired requests give Solomon two distinct problems to answer: how to be loved, and how to deal with a difficult wife. The arrangement makes the stories parallel without making their outcomes equivalent. Melisso must reconsider the character of his own generosity; Giosefo instead applies the lesson he draws from a public demonstration of physical discipline.

Counsel and Its Consequences

Solomon answers Melisso with a single instruction: love. He then dismisses him and hears Giosefo, whose answer is equally compressed: go to Goosebridge. Neither young man can see how these directions address his problem, and they leave the king believing themselves dismissed without useful counsel.

The meaning of Giosefo’s answer emerges on the return journey. At a bridge, the travelers watch a mule refuse to cross. Its muleteer first tries moderate blows, then beats it more severely as it shies and turns back. Melisso and Giosefo urge him to use gentler treatment; the muleteer replies that he knows his mule and continues until it crosses. When Giosefo learns that the bridge is called Goosebridge, he recognizes the place-name as the answer Solomon gave him.

Giosefo carries that interpretation home. When his wife leaves the table in anger and withdraws to a chamber, he follows with a young-oak stick, pulls her down by the hair, and beats her until she begs for mercy and promises not to oppose his wishes again. The next morning she rises early to ask what he wants prepared for dinner. The tale presents this change as proof that the advice worked, while making clear that the violence is Giosefo’s chosen application of Solomon’s cryptic words, not an explicit instruction from the king to beat her.

Melisso’s advice takes a different course. After returning home, he recounts Solomon’s answer to a man of understanding, who explains that Melisso’s hospitality has been performed for pomp and display rather than out of affection. By learning to love the people he entertains, Melisso may become loved in return. The story closes by pairing the two results: Giosefo’s wife has been corrected, and Melisso, once he loves, is beloved.

Narrative Role and Significance

Solomon’s brevity organizes the tale’s two-part design. His answers do not supply step-by-step instructions; the travelers must encounter circumstances that make them intelligible. The mule and its stubborn passage across the bridge turn a place-name into an interpretation, while the explanation offered to Melisso reveals the gap between conspicuous generosity and affection. In one case the advice is decoded through observation; in the other, through reflection on motive.

The tale is introduced by the queen with an argument that women should be obedient to men and that force may be needed to restrain them. Giosefo’s action and its apparent success fit that framing, but the episode also distinguishes Solomon’s words from the brutality with which Giosefo interprets them. Solomon thus anchors the tale’s reputation for wisdom, while its paired outcomes expose the different moral weight of counsel understood through self-examination and counsel enacted as coercion.