Pyramus and Thisbe

A story told to defy a god

Ovid places this tale inside another one. In Book 4 of the Metamorphoses the daughters of Minyas, king of Orchomenus, refuse to join the rites of Dionysus and stay at home weaving, telling stories to pass the time. The first sister weighs several possible tales before choosing this one because, she says, it is not widely known. That remark is a hint that Ovid was reaching for an obscure eastern legend rather than retelling a familiar Greek myth. When the sisters finish, Dionysus punishes their impiety by turning them into bats, so the tragic love story is framed by yet another transformation.

The narrator includes details that later summaries tend to lose. Babylon is identified as the city whose brick walls Semiramis built. The meeting place is the tomb of Ninus, Semiramis's husband, where a mulberry tree heavy with white fruit stands beside a cold spring. The lioness has come to drink after killing cattle. The lovers address the wall directly, half scolding and half thanking it for letting their words through, and kiss their own sides of it at nightfall.

Ovid's strangest simile and Thisbe's prayer

When Pyramus stabs himself, Ovid compares the jet of his blood to water hissing out of a split lead pipe, a startlingly urban, mechanical image that has puzzled and amused readers for centuries. Some see it as deliberately grotesque; others think it suits a poem obsessed with the physical process of change, since the spray of blood is exactly what darkens the berries. As Pyramus dies, he opens his eyes once at the sound of Thisbe's name, sees her, and closes them again.

Thisbe's final speech supplies the two aitia, or explanations of origins, that the tale exists to give. She asks the tree to keep its fruit dark as a sign of mourning, and she asks both sets of parents to bury the lovers together in one tomb. Ovid says the prayer moved both gods and parents: mulberries ripen dark, and the ashes of the pair rest in a single urn. The families never appear on stage, and there is no reconciliation scene of the kind Shakespeare gives the Montagues and Capulets.

Before Ovid: a river and a spring

Scholars generally think the story first took shape in the Near East, specifically in Cilicia in southern Anatolia, where the river Pyramus (today's Ceyhan) flowed. Fragments of a later Greek tradition say the lovers were transformed into a river and a spring rather than leaving a stained tree behind. The clearest evidence is a Roman-era floor mosaic from the House of Dionysus at Nea Paphos on Cyprus, which shows Pyramus as a reclining river-god and Thisbe fleeing from a big cat. Wall paintings at Pompeii, including one in the House of Octavius Quartio (once called the House of Loreius Tiburtinus), show the more familiar Ovidian ending, with Thisbe stabbing herself over Pyramus's body. Taken together, these suggest that Ovid chose one strand of a story that existed in more than one form.

From medieval romance to the rude mechanicals

The tale was one of the most retold passages of Ovid in the Middle Ages. A twelfth-century French poem, Piramus et Tisbé, expanded it into a courtly romance. Boccaccio included Thisbe among his famous women, and Chaucer gave her the second legend, after Cleopatra, in his Legend of Good Women. Shakespeare used it twice in the same years. Romeo and Juliet borrows the structure, through Arthur Brooke's poem and its Italian sources, while A Midsummer Night's Dream mocks it outright: Bottom and the Athenian workmen stage "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe," with actors playing Wall, Moonshine and Lion. That double use shows how familiar the story already was to Elizabethan audiences. In Spain, Góngora wrote a famously difficult burlesque Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe (1618).

It is worth noting that this is not strictly a Greek myth. No gods intervene, no hero appears, and the setting is Mesopotamian. It belongs instead with stories of forbidden love and with the many plant-origin tales collected among the transformation myths, alongside Hyacinthus and Daphne. The theme of a lover undone by a single mistake also links it to Orpheus and Eurydice, told a few books later in the same poem.

Ancient sources

• Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.55–166 — the full story, told by a daughter of Minyas: the wall, the tomb of Ninus, the lioness, the double suicide, the darkened mulberries and the shared urn.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.1–54 and 4.389–415 — the frame narrative of the Minyades who refuse Dionysus's festival and are turned into bats.
• Hyginus, Fabulae 243 — lists Thisbe of Babylon among women who killed themselves, because of Pyramus's death.
• House of Dionysus mosaic, Nea Paphos (Cyprus) — visual evidence for a version in which Pyramus is a river-god.

Frequently asked questions

Is Pyramus and Thisbe a Greek myth?

It is preserved in Latin by Ovid and set in Babylon, but it probably derives from a Hellenistic Greek tale linked to the river Pyramus in Cilicia. Ancient Greek sources for it are fragmentary, which is why Ovid's narrator calls it little known.

Why are mulberries red in the myth?

Pyramus's blood soaks the roots and spatters the white fruit, and Thisbe's dying prayer asks the tree to keep dark berries forever as a memorial. Ovid presents the dark mulberry as the gods' answer to that prayer.

How is the story used in A Midsummer Night's Dream?

It is the play-within-the-play performed by Bottom and his fellow workmen at Theseus's wedding. Shakespeare turns the tragedy into farce, with a man playing the wall and holding up his fingers as the chink.

Did Pyramus and Thisbe's families reconcile?

Ovid only says the parents granted Thisbe's request and placed the lovers' ashes in one urn. The fuller reconciliation of feuding families is Shakespeare's addition in Romeo and Juliet.