I ask you, do ghosts even walk? Wear clothes? Sleep?
PAMPHILUS: They even sleep together – though after their own fashion.
MARIA: Well! Witty fellow, aren’t you?
PAMPHILUS: But what will you say if I demonstrate with Achillean proofs that I’m dead and you’re a murderer?
MARIA: Perish the thought, Pamphilus! But proceed to your argument.
PAMPHILUS: In the first place, you’ll grant, I suppose, that death is nothing but the removal of soul from body?
MARIA: Granted. . . .
PAMPHILUS: Then you won’t deny that whoever robs another of his soul is a murderer?
MARIA: I allow it.
PAMPHILUS: You’ll concede also what’s affirmed by the most respected authors and endorsed by the assent of so many ages: that man’s soul is not where it animates but where it loves.
MARIA: Explain this more simply. I don’t follow your meaning well enough. . . .
PAMPHILUS: Men seized by a divine inspiration neither hear nor see nor smell nor feel, even if you kill them.
MARIA: Yes, I’ve heard that.
PAMPHILUS: What do you suppose is the reason?
MARIA: You tell me, professor.
PAMPHILUS: Obviously because their spirit is in heaven, where it possesses what it ardently loves, and is absent from the body.
MARIA: What of it?
PAMPHILUS: What of it, you unfeeling girl? It follows both that I’m dead and that you’re the murderer.
MARIA: Where’s your soul, then?
PAMPHILUS: Where it loves.
MARIA: But who robbed you of your soul? – Why do you sigh? Speak freely; I won’t hold it against you.
PAMPHILUS: Cruelest of girls, whom nevertheless I can’t hate even if I’m dead!
MARIA: Naturally. But why don’t you in turn deprive her of her soul – tit for tat, as they say?
PAMPHILUS: I’d like nothing better if the exchange could be such that her spirit migrated to my breast, as my spirit has gone over completely to her body.
MARIA: But may I, in turn, play the sophist with you?
PAMPHILUS: The sophistress.
MARIA: It isn’t possible for the same body to be living and lifeless, is it?
PAMPHILUS: No, not at the same time.
MARIA: When the soul’s gone, then the body’s dead?
PAMPHILUS: Yes.
MARIA: It doesn’t animate except when it’s present?
PAMPHILUS: Exactly.
MARIA: Then how does it happen that although the soul’s there where it loves, it nevertheless animates the body left behind? If it animates that body even when it loves elsewhere, how can the animated body be called lifeless?
PAMPHILUS: You dispute cunningly enough, but you won’t catch me with such snares. The soul that somehow or other governs the body of a lover is incorrectly called soul, since actually it consists of certain slight remnants of soul – just as the scent of roses remains in your hand even if the rose is taken away. . . .
MARIA: Now don’t begrudge an answer to this, too: do you love willingly or unwillingly?
PAMPHILUS: Willingly.
MARIA: Then since one is free not to love, whoever loves seems to be a self-murderer. To blame the girl is unjust.
PAMPHILUS: Yet the girl doesn’t kill by being loved but by failing to return the love. Whoever can save someone and refrains from doing so is guilty of murder.
MARIA: Suppose a young man loves what is forbidden, for example another man’s wife or a Vestal Virgin? She won’t return his love in order to save the lover, will she?
PAMPHILUS: But this young man loves what it’s lawful and right, and reasonable and honorable, to love. . . .
First, Maria attempts to turn Pamphilus’s attention away from his poetic flights of fancy by encouraging him to take stock of his concrete, living self. To his insistence that his soul has fled his body and migrated to hers, she repeatedly calls attention to his own evident and lively embodiment and animation. To his claim that she is responsible for his suffering, she makes him confess that he loves willingly, reminding him of his free agency. (“Then since one is free not to love, whoever loves seems to be a self-murderer.”) When he then protests that the girl kills not “by being loved but by failing to return the love,” she cunningly asks: “Suppose a young man loves what is forbidden, for example, another man’s wife or a Vestal Virgin? She won’t return his love in order to save the lover, will she?” Pamphilus is compelled, for the first time, to acknowledge that love must bow before what is licit and honorable: “But this young man,” he barks, “loves what it’s lawful and right, and reasonable and honorable, to love.”
But he quickly backtracks: “and yet he [that is, Pamphilus the licit lover] is slain.” When (in passages not quoted here) he next adds to the crime of murder (that is, of not returning his love) the charge of poisoning or sorcery (that is, displaying her charms), Maria denies all responsibility, cleverly pointing out that the witchcraft must be in the eye of the beholder, since only he is smitten by her look. Summoning all his manly wit and ardor, Pamphilus proceeds to bring Maria before the high court of Venus. Borrowing from the tragedians of old, he wants her to recognize the monstrous erotic woes that might befall someone who rejects the love of a worthy suitor, such as himself. Warning her that Eros might punish her by fixing her own passionate attachment on a hideously ugly, bankrupt, and beastly man, and insisting that he as a lover should be rewarded for loving, he concludes with a dire warning and a plea: “Don’t provoke Nemesis; return your lover’s love.” We have reached a major turning point in the courtship.
PAMPHILUS: Then don’t provoke Nemesis: return your lover’s love.
MARIA: If that’s enough, I do return it.
PAMPHILUS: But I’d want this love to be lasting and to be mine alone. I’m courting a wife, not a mistress.
MARIA: I know that, but I must deliberate a long time over what can’t be revoked once it’s begun.
PAMPHILUS: I’ve thought it over a very long time.
MARIA: See that love, who’s not the best adviser, doesn’t trick you. For they say he’s blind.
PAMPHILUS: But one who proceeds with caution is keen-sighted. You don’t appear to me as you do because I
