The pear tree in Lidia and Pyrrhus’s trick

The pear tree in Lidia and Pyrrhus’s trick is made to seem an enchanted witness, although its supposed power is a deception staged by Lydia and Pyrrhus. In the garden, the lovers arrange for Nicostratus to see their intimacy, then persuade him that the tree has made him misread what happened. Its importance lies in this reversal: the object that appears to reveal adultery instead becomes the explanation that allows the affair to continue, and its destruction gives the deception a convincing end.

The tree as the setting for a staged vision

The episode begins after Lydia has already demonstrated her willingness to deceive her husband. She arranged for a tooth to be pulled from Nicostratus and showed him a decayed tooth she had prepared, making him believe that the false tooth was the one removed. She then sent the actual tooth to Pyrrhus as proof of her love. The garden scene extends this earlier stratagem: instead of using a substituted object to mislead her husband, she and Pyrrhus use the pear tree to make him doubt his own sight.

Lydia pretends to be unwell and asks to be taken into the garden. Nicostratus and Pyrrhus support her on either side and set her down on a grassplot beneath a fine pear tree. After they have sat for a while, Lydia asks Pyrrhus to climb up and throw down some pears. The request gives him a plausible reason to be above the couple and places him where he can begin the performance they have arranged.

From the tree, Pyrrhus calls down as if scandalized. He accuses Nicostratus and Lydia of behaving intimately in front of him, insisting that he can see them although they have not moved. The accusation is a deliberate contradiction: the two people below appear to be sitting quietly, while the supposed witness above describes a different scene. Nicostratus initially treats Pyrrhus as a dreamer, but Pyrrhus maintains that he is neither asleep nor imagining things. Each protest makes the pear tree, rather than the lovers’ conduct, seem increasingly responsible for the disagreement.

Turning sight into a trap

Pyrrhus descends and tells Nicostratus that he saw him with Lydia while he was in the tree. Nicostratus denies having left his place. The description is therefore designed to implicate the husband in the very act he has not yet witnessed, giving him reason to test the tree’s supposed effect for himself. He climbs up, and as soon as he reaches the top Lydia and Pyrrhus embrace and make love below. From his new position, Nicostratus sees what Pyrrhus had claimed to see.

The lovers immediately undo the apparent evidence. When Nicostratus comes down, they are sitting where he left them and say that they never moved. His direct observation has not disappeared, but Lydia and Pyrrhus supply it with an alternative explanation: the tree must have distorted his sight, just as it supposedly distorted Pyrrhus’s. Pyrrhus argues that Nicostratus should distrust the vision because Lydia is reputed to be virtuous and discreet, and because he himself would not have dared to act so openly in his master’s presence. The appeal to Lydia’s reputation and to the implausibility of the scene competes with what Nicostratus has just seen.

Lydia adds a performance of indignation. She asks why she would commit such an outrage before Pyrrhus, then suggests that if she ever desired such conduct, she would have the sense to arrange it in one of their chambers so that her husband would not discover it. The remark appears to defend her honor, but it also redirects Nicostratus’s attention: the question becomes whether a discreet woman would choose such an exposed place, rather than whether the lovers have been together. Faced with this reasoning and the impossible-seeming conflict between the scene and his sight, Nicostratus gives up his reproaches and accepts that the tree has caused the marvel.

The tree is condemned and cut down

Once Nicostratus has accepted the explanation, Lydia declares that the tree must never again bring such shame upon her or another woman. She tells Pyrrhus to fetch a hatchet and cut it down. The order turns the tree into the offender and the cutting into apparent redress. Lydia also rebukes Nicostratus for having allowed his judgment to be blinded so quickly: even if the vision seemed certain to his eyes, she suggests, he ought not to have believed it in his mind. Her reproach recasts his suspicion as a failure of judgment rather than a sound response to the evidence.

Pyrrhus readily brings the hatchet and fells the pear tree. Lydia then says that, with the enemy of her honor overthrown, her anger has passed, and she graciously forgives the husband who asks her pardon. The tree’s physical destruction seals the explanation in a visible act. Nicostratus can treat the problem as finished because the supposed source of the visions has been removed; Lydia and Pyrrhus, meanwhile, return with him to the palace.

Function and consequence

The pear tree’s role depends on a carefully repeated pattern: Pyrrhus sees adultery from above, Nicostratus disbelieves him from below, and then Nicostratus sees the lovers when he takes Pyrrhus’s place. The changing viewpoint makes the same setting appear to support incompatible accounts. Rather than resolve that contradiction by trusting his own observation, Nicostratus accepts the explanation that protects his belief in Lydia’s virtue. The tree thus functions less as a magical object than as a prop through which the lovers manipulate sight, position, and credibility.

Its felling does not end the affair. The account concludes that afterward Pyrrhus and Lydia enjoyed one another more freely and at greater ease. The destruction of the tree therefore removes the visible pretext for suspicion without removing the cause of the deception. What is cut down is not the lovers’ arrangement, but the object to which Nicostratus has been taught to attribute his discovery.