Pyramus and Thisbe

Author: Ovid

Time Period: 1 CE–500 CE

Country or Culture: Roman

Genre: Myth

Overview

Arguably one of the most popular ancient love myths in the Western world, “Pyramus and Thisbe” tells of star-crossed lovers who unite only in death and whose blood forever stains the mulberry fruit. The Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE–ca. 17/18 CE) recounts the original version of the story in book 4 of his Metamorphoses, a poetic tour de force representing mythical cycles of supernatural transformations with astonishing energy and originality. Many readers are familiar with this version, but even more know of the countless stories the ancient tale has inspired, including Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (ca. 1385–86 CE); William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1594–95) and his comic version of the tale, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–96); and modern films such as Titanic (1997). In part thanks to Ovid’s legacy, love stories celebrating unshakeable devotion have become cultural staples.

Although there is no surviving version of the story prior to Ovid’s, several ancient descriptions suggest a possible source in a simple tale of two lovers named Pyramus and Thisbe who engage in premarital intercourse, resulting in Thisbe’s pregnancy and subsequent suicide. When Pyramus then kills himself, the gods take pity on the lovers and transform them both into rivers. Ovid likely used this myth to create his much more compelling story of Pyramus and Thisbe, who, in his version, are beautiful neighbors in the city of Babylon that fall in love against the wishes of their parents.

Communicating in secret through a crack in a wall shared by their houses, they plan to flee the city and to meet at a mulberry tree near a gravesite. Thisbe arrives first but is frightened away by a lioness and flees to a cave, leaving behind her veil. Fresh from hunting, the lioness bloodies the veil and then returns to the woods. When Pyramus arrives and sees the animal’s tracks and the veil, he assumes that Thisbe has been killed and commits suicide in despair; his blood stains the tree’s white berries. Thisbe returns anxiously to find her lover and discovers Pyramus just before he dies. She too commits suicide but first prays that her parents unite them in a single tomb and that the tree memorialize their death by preserving the crimson color of its fruit.

There was a fissure, a thin split, in the shared wall between their houses, which traced back to when it was built. No one had discovered the flaw in all those years—but what can love not detect?—You lovers saw it first, and made it a path for your voices. Your endearments passed that way, in safety, in the gentlest of murmurs.

“Pyramus and Thisbe,” Metamorphoses

In altering his source material, Ovid went far beyond creating a moving story of tragic love that also explains the color of mulberries. In context, his story reflects significant irony as told by the narrator Arsippe, one of the daughters of Minyas, who tells the story to her sisters when they all refuse to celebrate the rites of Bacchus, the god of wine. A structural analysis focusing on Ovid’s rhetorical techniques, including the rich use of irony, reveals how he develops the themes of separation and transgression to focus the story not only on the main characters but also on the narrator as she offers the tale ostensibly as a warning against rash emotion but ultimately suffers punishment at the hands of Bacchus. In this way, a structural analysis expands our understanding of Ovid’s tale, whose larger context and full meaning was lost in subsequent versions.

Summary

Ovid begins “Pyramus and Thisbe” by placing it in a larger narrative context as the poet describes how the story comes to be told. By command of the local priest, everyone in town celebrates a festival dedicated to the god Bacchus—everyone, that is, except the daughters of Minyas, who impiously deny the god’s divine lineage and refuse to participate in the rites. Instead, the women remain indoors, dedicating themselves to their weaving and to >Minerva, a goddess associated with weaving, among other things. One of the sisters, Arsippe, suggests that the women tell stories to more easily pass their hours of hard work. Her sisters agree and ask Arsippe to begin. After considering several options, she chooses the story of the how the fruit of the mulberry tree came to be red.

Arsippe introduces Pyramus and Thisbe as the most beautiful and desirable youths in the city of Babylon. Living in adjacent houses, they eventually fall in love and wish to marry, but their parents prevent it. Despite and in part because of this opposition, their attraction grows stronger. The lovers communicate through nonverbal signals and discover a crack in a common wall of their houses. Through this crack, they secretly communicate, and they recognize this cracked wall as an essential mechanism when Arsippe describes them speaking to it directly, blaming the wall for their separation and yet thanking it for allowing some measure of connection: “[W]e owe it to you that words are allowed to pass to loving ears” (lines 55–92). Each night they part, offering kisses that cannot reach beyond the wall.

One day, the lovers decide to escape from their houses and the city so that they can meet undeterred in the countryside. They agree to meet near the tomb of Ninus (founder of Nineveh) and to hide beneath a nearby mulberry tree. Thisbe successfully escapes from her house and arrives at the appointed place, but she immediately spies a lioness, jaws bloody from hunting cattle, that comes to drink from a spring near the tree. Thisbe flees in terror to a dark cave but leaves behind her veil as she retreats. The lioness tears and bloodies the veil but then leaves it and returns to the woods. Pyramus then arrives and first sees the animal’s tracks, which cause him to turn pale with fear. When he discovers the bloody veil but no sign of Thisbe, he immediately assumes the lioness has killed her and decides to die, proclaiming, “Two lovers will be lost in one night” (93–127). He addresses Thisbe in her absence, explicitly blaming himself for her death because he did not arrive earlier. Taking her veil, he places himself beneath the mulberry tree and commands the cloth to soak his blood as well as that of his beloved. With that, he stabs himself with his sword, and when he pulls the sword from the wound, his blood soaks the tree’s roots underneath him and spurts forth onto the white mulberries above, dying them a “deep blackish-red.”

Thisbe then returns to the scene, fearful that she will miss her lover but anxious to tell him about the lioness. Puzzled by the now-red berries, she slowly recognizes their meeting place and then sees her lover’s dying body. She laments loudly, striking her arms and tearing her hair. She commands Pyramus to answer her and to raise his head, imploring, “Your dearest Thisbe calls to you.” Hearing Thisbe’s name, Pyramus briefly opens his eyes, only to close them again in death. At this point, Thisbe sees her bloodied veil and the empty scabbard of her lover and realizes that he has committed suicide. She then addresses him directly, stating that his love ruined him but that she too knows how to love. She resolves to follow him in death, refusing to allow it to further their separation, declaring, “He, who could only be removed from me by death, death cannot remove.” In her final words, she makes two requests: She asks that their parents place the lovers in the same tomb, and she asks the tree itself to memorialize the lovers’ death “and always carry your fruit darkened in mourning, a remembrance of the blood of us both” (128–66). With Pyramus’s sword, she then carries out her own suicide. Moved by these events and Thisbe’s prayer, the gods grant both of her requests; the ashes of the lovers are placed in one urn, and the ripened mulberry is always deep red.

After Arsippe completes her tragic story, her sisters tell three more stories that all present the tragic consequences of passionate desire. All seems to be well as they continue their weaving until they suddenly hear the drums and clashing cymbals of the Bacchic rites. Their looms and cloth begin to transform into vines bearing grapes and ivy, and their house shakes and glows with firelight. When the sisters hear phantoms howling, they rush to hide from the smoke and light. In their hiding places, they feel themselves transforming into small winged creatures that squeak, but they cannot see how they have metamorphosed. When the narrator, who is once again Ovid, states that these creatures flock in rafters and prefer night to day, the reader understands that Bacchus has transformed the daughters of Minyas into bats.

Bibliography

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