Jesuit Seminario Romano. The tragedy narrates the last day in the life of St. Hermenegild, who converted to the Catholic faith and rebelled against his father, the Arian Visigoth King Liuvigild, and whose defeat, exile, and death were celebrated as a martyrdom in the struggle against Arianism. Pallavicino’s postscript to the play elucidates the author’s views on theatre, its rules, and its functions as a pedagogical tool. While contemporary secular plays and operas played to an uneducated crowd that wanted to be amazed by scenic effects, the unspectacular theatre of Sforza Pallavicino aspired to educate by providing the public with strong and exemplary characters to emulate. Pallavicino identifies the true function of the tragic genre in the fortification of honesty and morality in the audience. He believes that the plot of the tragedy is the foundation on which its success should rely. His disdain for deus ex machina characters, personifications of moral and allegorical qualities, supernatural events, and asides, choruses and messengers as devices to provide information, fully represents his belief that the dramatist should build dramatic action on detailed and verisimilar situations. According to Pallavicino «wonder without verisimilitude is easily achieved and gives no pleasure except perhaps that of laughter to those who hear the plot, nor does it merit the name of poetry». In clear opposition to the taste of Marino and his followers, Pallavicino suggests looking at classical writers to see how verisimilitude can convey a feeling of wonder. Unlike the baroque writers of the time who thought that precious style could make the reader forget about any violation of verisimilitude, Pallavicino affirms that classic decorum and good taste, the very foundation of verisimilitude, can convey the feeling of marvel to the public. Theological and philosophical works In 1649 Pallavicino began the publication of his great dogmatic work in conjunction with his theological lectures, Assertiones theologicae. The complete work treats the entire field of dogma in nine books. The first five books appeared in three volumes (Rome, 1649), the remaining four books are included in volumes IV—VIII (Rome, 1650–1652). Immediately after this he began the publication of disputations on the second part of the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, R. P. Sfortiae Pallavicini. Disputationum in Iam IIae d. Thomae tomus I (Lyons, 1653). Pallavicino attempted to reconcile Aristotle with the new science. His Christian Aristotelianism did not keep him from calling himself a follower of Galileo (“Galileista”),