The Psychomachia stages its argument as a sequence of single combats, each pitting a virtue against a matching vice, and each combat ends the same way, virtue victorious, vice destroyed. Faith, unarmored, defeats Cult of the Old Gods, the poem's opening combat and its clearest statement of the poem's stakes, since idolatry rather than a moral failing is the first enemy dispatched. Chastity beheads Lust, who has just cast a firebrand meant to overwhelm her. Patience stands motionless while Wrath exhausts herself against an armor of endurance, then Wrath falls on her own sword in despair, the poem's one vice that is undone by doing nothing at all. Humility beheads Pride after Pride, riding a horse named Ostentation, falls into a pit that her own ally Deceit dug and concealed, whereupon Hope finishes what Humility's blow began. Sobriety, Good Works and Concord win the remaining combats against Indulgence, Avarice and Discord, and after the last vice falls, the virtues raise a temple to Concord within the redeemed soul and Wisdom takes her throne inside it. Each combat is built from the same three part shape, a taunt or temptation from the vice, a moment where the outcome seems uncertain, and a sudden violent reversal in the virtue's favor, a pattern later medieval allegory borrowed wholesale along with the poem's central device of dressing an abstract moral quality as a fighting warrior woman.