Pyramus and Thisbe

/pir"euh meuhs/, Class. Myth.

two young lovers of Babylon who held conversations clandestinely, and in defiance of their parents, through a crack in a wall. On believing Thisbe dead, Pyramus killed himself. When Thisbe discovered his body she committed suicide.

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Hero and heroine of a Babylonian love story related in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Their parents forbade them to meet, so they communicated through a hole in the wall between their two houses before at last deciding to run away together. They agreed to meet at a mulberry tree. Arriving first, Thisbe was scared away by a lion, which shredded the veil she dropped when she fled. Pyramus, finding the veil, believed her dead and stabbed himself; she returned and, finding Pyramus dying, killed herself. The fruit of the mulberry tree, white until then, was stained dark purple by the lovers' blood.

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▪ Babylonian mythology

      hero and heroine of a Babylonian love story, in which they were able to communicate only through a crack in the wall between their houses; the tale was related by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Book IV. Though their parents refused to consent to their union, the lovers at last resolved to flee together and agreed to meet under a mulberry tree. Thisbe, first to arrive, was terrified by the roar of a lioness and took to flight. In her haste she dropped her veil, which the lioness tore to pieces with jaws stained with the blood of an ox. Pyramus, believing that she had been devoured by the lioness, stabbed himself. When Thisbe returned and found her lover mortally wounded under the mulberry tree, she put an end to her own life. From that time forward, legend relates, the fruit of the mulberry, previously white, was black.

      The story was told in Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, and a farcical version is acted by the “rude mechanicals” in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

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