Pyramus and Thisbe

Before delving into the action of the story proper, it is useful to consider the narrative framework of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” The poem is an inset narrative: a story within a story. Book 4 of the Metamorphoses opens not in Pyramus and Thisbe’s hometown of Babylon, but in the Greek city of Thebes, where the impious daughters of Minyas are shirking worship of the god Bacchus (Lines 1-54). As the sisters weave, they tell stories to entertain each other; the first (unnamed) daughter covers “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Thus the poem is narrated not by Ovid, but rather by one of his characters—an important distinction to make. “Pyramus and Thisbe” is not (necessarily) to be read in Ovid’s voice. Rather, the author is one step removed; he mediates the tale through the voice of a female character. Ovid is fond of this sort of framing device. He also does not shy away from imagining the experience of women: His collection of epistolary poetry, the Heroides, is narrated from the perspective of mythological heroines writing letters to their absent lovers.

As the daughter of Minyas ponders which story to “weave” for her sisters, Ovid slips in another important detail. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is aetiological; that is, it will account for the causes or origins of something. In this case, it will explain why the white berries of the mulberry tree are now a deep shade of red (Lines 50-51). Many of the myths in the Metamorphoses are aetiological. Ovid’s tone is playfully educational here, offering fanciful, mythical explanations for why the world is how it is.

While Minyas’s daughters live in Greece, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe takes Ovid’s Roman readers to an even more exotic locale: the faraway city of Babylon. (Seriramis, mentioned at Line 59, was a mythological Babylonian queen.) This is a proper storybook setting for a Roman fairy tale. Once upon a time, Ovid tells us, there were two beautiful young people, Pyramus and Thisbe. Pyramus is the handsomest youth and Thisbe, the fairest maiden; the couplet of Lines 56-57 mirror the two lovers against each other, already suggesting them to be a picture-perfect match.

Like in many fairy tales, the fathers of these star-crossed lovers forbid them to wed. But while the fathers can control the exterior conditions of love, they cannot regulate Pyramus and Thisbe’s interior emotional life. This focus on the subjective experience of the individual is another hallmark of Roman elegiac poetry.

In Lines 61-65, Ovid plays with images of fire, which had the same connotations with sex for the ancients as they do for modern readers. Like fire, sexual desire is spontaneous, unable to be regulated. While Pyramus and Thisbe’s fathers will not allow them to light the wedding torches (a traditional component of Roman weddings), they are unsuccessful in snuffing out the flames of their passion. This mention of torches is a little ominous too, as torches are also an important accessory for Roman funerals. Ovid leverages this dual association with torches in another of the Metamorphoses’ tragic love stories, Book 10’s treatment of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Lines 64 and 65 build suspense. The lovers struggle to communicate—but why? They use a secret language known only to them, but have no “go-between”; both references to standard plot elements in erotic poetry and plays, in which trusted slaves or confidants would ferry messages back and forth between lovers. The primary obstacle is finally revealed at Line 66: There is a physical barrier, a wall, keeping Pyramus and Thisbe apart. But the lovers soon find a hole in this barrier, a flaw they can leverage to make closer contact with each other. The poem’s translator, A. D. Melville, uses anaphora—the repetition of certain words or phrases at the start of a line—to convey the breathlessness of their communication (Lines 70-73). In their ardor, Pyramus and Thisbe even plead with the wall as if it were a person, an example of poetic personification (Lines 74-78).

After they part for the evening, Ovid uses a poetic couplet to describe the breaking of dawn (Lines 82-83). This device finds its origins in the Homeric epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, where descriptions of “rosy-fingered Dawn” are used as an artful means to change scene.

That night, the lovers hatch a plan to run away together, meeting at the tomb of Ninus. Ninus was the legendary founder of Nineveh and the lover of Seriramis, the Babylonian queen mentioned at Line 59. In this light it is an appropriate meeting place for a lover’s tryst—but again, there are foreboding undertones. Ninus’s tomb will be the death of Pyramus and Thisbe, too.

But the story is not quite there yet. Ovid takes a moment to describe a tranquil nighttime scene: the snow-white fruit of the mulberry tree and nearby, a cool spring of water (Lines 90-92). This is a classic example of a locus amoenus, a literary pleasant place. These locales are mainstays in pastoral poetry as sites for relaxation and lovemaking, but in Ovid, they are often transformed into loci horridi—fearful places, as Pyramus and Thisbe’s spring will be here.

After another poetic description of the sun setting into the sea, Ovid offers a mini transformation in an epic focused on metamorphosis: love “transforms” Thisbe into a bold girl (Line 95). But halfway through the line, her courage is interrupted by a harbinger of death: a hungry lioness. The lioness does not threaten Thisbe directly—no one physically harms the lovers, in fact, except themselves—but she does kick off the final series of misunderstandings which will lead to their demise. Shakespeare uses similar narrative techniques in his “Pyramus and Thisbe”-adjacent tragedy Romeo and Juliet.

While Thisbe hides in a nearby cave, Pyramus arrives. He takes her bloodied shawl as proof that Thisbe has been killed and, notably, takes all the blame for her death on himself, though their plan had seemed to be mutual. Pyramus addresses the lions of the area directly—a literary device called apostrophe—but in typical youthful fashion, he is unwilling to wait around to see what happens. Like other epic literary lovers, he resigns himself to take his own life, but is not entirely successful. His botched attempt at suicide is both heartbreaking and a little humorous—an Ovidian specialty—and his blood splatters on the white mulberry berries, dying them red. Melville rhymes the last couplet describing the scene before Ovid transitions to Thisbe’s perspective (“[…] the blood-soaked roots / Tinged with a purple dye the hanging fruits,” Lines 126-27).

When Thisbe returns and finds Pyramus, in another artfully tragic touch, the dying Pyramus responds not to his own name, but to hers (Lines 146-47). It is a common theme in love poetry for the boundaries between lover and beloved to blur—love has a way of obliterating personal identity. Ovid emphasizes this blurring and mirrors the lovers again with a couplet in Thisbe’s death speech: “[…] Your hand, your heart destroyed you; mine, / My hand, my heart are brave for this deed too” (Lines 150-51). The lovers are as perfectly matched in death as they were in life. Like Pyramus, Thisbe selflessly takes full responsibility for her lover’s death. Again, Melville signals an important theme of the story with a rhyming couplet (“And you whom death alone from me could sever, / Death now shall have no power to part us ever,” Lines 155-56). While the lovers could not be joined in life, they are now joined in death.

Ovid concludes the poem briefly, but happily. Somehow Pyramus and Thisbe’s absent fathers—and the gods—have heard her final prayer. The lovers are interred together, and the mulberry tree’s red berries stand as an enduring testament to their love.