know me well enough. If you’d wear the shoe, you’d feel then where it pinched.
PAMPHILUS: I’ll have to take the chance; though I infer from many signs that the match will succeed.
MARIA: You’re a soothsayer too?
PAMPHILUS: I am.
MARIA: Then by what auguries do you infer this? Has the night owl flown?
PAMPHILUS: That flies for fools.
MARIA: Has a pair of doves flown from the right?
PAMPHILUS: Nothing of the sort. But the integrity of your parents has been known to me for years now. In the first place, good birth is far from a bad sign. Nor am I unaware of the wholesome instruction and godly examples by which you’ve been reared; and good education is better than good birth. That’s another sign. In addition, between my family – not an altogether contemptible one, I believe – and yours there has long been intimate friendship. In fact, you and I have known each other to our fingertips, as they say, since childhood, and our temperaments are pretty much the same. We’re nearly equal in age; our parents, in wealth, reputation, and rank. Finally – and this is the special mark of friendship, since excellence by itself is no guarantee of compatibility – your tastes seem to fit my temperament not at all badly. How mine agree with yours, I don’t know.
Obviously, darling, these omens assure me that we shall have a blessed, lasting, happy marriage, provided you don’t intend to sing a song of woe for our prospects.
MARIA: What song do you want?
PAMPHILUS: I’ll play “I am yours”; you chime in with “I am yours.”
MARIA: A short song, all right, but it has a long finale.†
PAMPHILUS: What matter how long, if only it be joyful?
Maria, who has all the while been waiting for just the right opening, sees it and moves in. When challenged to “return your lover’s love,” she responds coolly and almost offhandedly, “If that’s enough, I do return it.” Nothing more rankles a man bent on a genuine victory than too easy or casual a concession, and so it is with Pamphilus. “But I’d want this love to be lasting and to be mine alone,” he insists, and adds, in a first-time confession, “I’m courting a wife, not a mistress.” “I know that,” Maria replies, again offhandedly, pretending that she had assumed all along that marriage was uppermost in his mind. Maria has gotten his speech to move from the realm of love to the domain of marriage, seen as the home of enduring and exclusive attachment (“love . . . lasting and . . . mine alone”). She next turns Pamphilus into matrimony’s leading defender. By obliging him to make the case for marriage, through addressing her feigned reservations and genuine concerns, she deftly compels him to show whether and why he is a suitable husband.
She begins by insisting on the need for careful deliberation if one is interested in lasting marriage: “But I must deliberate a long time over what can’t be revoked once it’s begun.” Pamphilus, taking the bait, confidently steps forward to show his apparent superiority in thoughtfulness: “I’ve thought it over a very long time.” In response, Maria sets the hook: “See that love, who’s not the best adviser, doesn’t trick you.” In other words, prove it.
In a lovely ironic twist, Pamphilus, in order to satisfy his own desire for victory, must now explain to Maria why she ought willingly, indeed, ardently, to accept him as a husband. In doing so, he not only explains that his love of Maria is based on esteem and regard – “You don’t appear to me as you do because I love you; I love you because I’ve observed what you’re like” – but, more importantly, he defends, over and against Maria’s objections, the very things that Maria has all along deemed lawful and right, reasonable and honorable: exclusive love, marital permanence, children and family ties. Pamphilus is made to enumerate the signs that promise marital success: her good birth and good education, the friendship of their respective families, their own lifelong and intimate acquaintance, similar temperaments, equal age, and, especially, the likelihood of friendship based on compatible tastes. In suggesting that these attributes promise marital success, Pamphilus is – even today – hardly mistaken.
Maria, still suspecting that he is moved mainly by her looks, forces him to face the threats that disease and old age pose to her beauty – and that time itself poses to all love of the visibly beautiful:
MARIA: Maybe I’ll seem different to you when illness or old age has changed this beauty.
PAMPHILUS: Neither will I always be as handsome as I am now, my dear. But I don’t consider only this dwelling place, which is blooming and charming in every respect. I love the guest more.
MARIA: What guest?
PAMPHILUS: Your mind, whose beauty will forever increase with age.
MARIA: Truly you’re more than a Lynceus if you see through so much make-up!
PAMPHILUS: I see your thought through mine. Besides, we’ll renew our youth repeatedly in our children.
Pamphilus makes a double response to her concern about fading beauty: more than its “dwelling place,” he says first, he loves her mind, “whose beauty will forever increase with age”; and he adds, second, “[b]esides, we’ll renew our youth repeatedly in our children.” In this crucial second remark, Pamphilus, speaking no longer of “I” but of “we,” tacitly concedes their mortality and confesses a desire for children, indeed, for “our children.”
But though these remarks are music to her ears, Maria does not let on that she is pleased; on the contrary, she makes explicit, for the first time, the ever-latent theme of her threatened virginity. Modern readers, tempted here to tune out or roll their eyes, might instead try to discover what the fuss over virginity was once all about.
MARIA: But meantime my virginity will be gone.
PAMPHILUS: True, but see here: if you had a fine orchard, would you want it never to bear anything but blossoms, or would you prefer, after the blossoms have fallen, to see the trees heavy with ripe fruit?
MARIA: How artfully he argues!
PAMPHILUS: Answer this at least: which is the prettier sight, a vine rotting on the ground or encircling some post or elm tree and weighing it down with purple grapes?
MARIA: You answer me in turn: which is the more pleasing sight, a rose gleaming white on its bush or plucked and gradually withering?
PAMPHILUS: In my opinion the rose that withers in a man’s hand, delighting his eyes and nostrils the while, is luckier than one that grows old on a bush. For that one too would wither sooner or later. In the same way, wine is better if drunk before it sours. But a girl’s flower doesn’t fade the instant she marries. On the contrary, I see many girls who before marriage were pale, run-down, and as good as gone. The sexual side of marriage brightened them so much that they began to bloom at last.
MARIA: Yet virginity wins universal approval and applause.
PAMPHILUS: A maiden is something charming, but what’s more naturally unnatural than an old maid? Unless your mother had been deflowered, we wouldn’t have this blossom here. But if, as I hope, our marriage will not be barren, we’ll pay for one virgin with many.
MARIA:
