Pyramus and Thisbe

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 8

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Wall

The action of Pyramus and Thisbe is driven not by a human character, but by an inanimate obstacle: a wall. While English translations sometimes muddle the details (as this episode’s translator, A. D. Melville, does in Lines 12-13), the Latin text is clear: the shared wall is not structural. The reader is not meant to imagine that Pyramus and Thisbe’s bedrooms are directly adjacent to each other; rather this is a garden wall, a dividing line between two estates. But unlike Robert Frost’s more neighborly partition (See the Study Guide of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall), Ovid’s wall symbolizes not only the opposition between Pyramus and Thisbe’s fathers, but also their obstruction of their marriage. With this barrier, the owners of the homesteads have deliberately separated their households—and their inhabitants—both physically and metaphorically.

In this light, the crack in the wall symbolizes Pyramus and Thisbe’s ability to find common ground, even in the smallest of ways. An outside observer—the fathers, perhaps—would see the wall’s hole as a flaw. Because of the hole, the wall cannot fulfill its intended function. But the lovers not only find the wall sympathetic; despite its flaws, they personify it. They plead with the wall like a living person, revealing love’s power to draw high emotion out of lovers—and perhaps make them a little ridiculous. Pyramus and Thisbe’s attitude towards the hole in the wall fits into one of the broader themes of the Metamorphoses: the power of love to “metamorphize” the way we see and experience the world.

Ovid also uses the wall as a story element to give his myth an eastern flair. It is fitting that a story set in Babylon should prominently feature a wall; Babylon was famous in the ancient world for its mud-brick architecture. Its Hanging Gardens were impressive enough to be deemed one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. For a Roman audience, even a Babylonian wall’s building materials—mud-brick—would have felt fanciful and quaint. By Ovid’s day, Romans fortified their cities with stone.

Eastern Elements (Babylon, Seriramis, and Ninus)

While the poem’s two narrators—Minyas’s unnamed daughter and Ovid—are Greek and Roman respectively, “Pyramus and Thisbe” is set in Babylon. The setting certainly suits the material. The myth has no known pre-cursors in Greco-Roman literature—leading some to argue that Ovid made up the story himself—but scholars now agree that it is likely of Near Eastern origin. Ovid may have encountered it in a collection of Near Eastern myths (though the mulberry bush seems to have been his innovation). It makes sense that Ovid would set a Near Eastern story in a Near Eastern locale.

That being said, the poet likely had additional motives for setting his story in Babylon. Roman authors often used the East as an exotifying element in their works. While some of Rome’s neighbors were felt to be similar enough to the Romans—they felt some degree of cultural affinity with the Greeks, for example—Roman authors reliably portrayed eastern civilizations as foreign, un-Roman, and distinctly “other.” The most famous example of this can be found in the Catullus’s gender-bending Poem 63, which imagines an eastern mystery religion’s ability to transform a character from male to female and back to male again.

In “Pyramus and Thisbe,” however, Ovid uses Babylon less as a distancing device and more as way to lend his myth a storybook air. Not unlike the remarkable popularity of One Thousand and One Nights in Europe from the 18th century onwards, pseudo-Orientalism was a favorite vehicle for imaginative escapism in Roman society.

The Mulberry Bush

While “Pyramus and Thisbe” is most interested in the experiences and feelings of the lovers, the broader purpose of the poem is aetiological: it explains why the mulberry tree’s white berries are now a deep, purply red. Ovid is especially fond of this sort of aetiological motif—especially involving plants—in his Metamorphoses. Many ill-fated characters either affect the permanent transformation of plants (like Pyramus and Thisbe) or are transformed into the original version of a plant themselves (e.g. Narcissus, Hyacinthus, and Daphne).

The color of the berries also carries special meaning for Ovid’s theme. Red and white are the trademark colors of Roman erotic poetry (elegy). White is associated with purity and untouched innocence, both in women and young men. Ovid takes these associations with ivory to the extreme in Book 10’s myth of Pygmalion, a craftsman who falls in love with his creation. In contrast, red is the color of sexual passion. It signals the shame a beloved feels when first exposed to sexual desire; the image of a red flush overcoming ivory cheeks is a common motif. Red has connections with blood and violence too (another prominent theme in Ovid). In choosing the mulberry tree as Pyramus and Thisbe’s signature plant, Ovid broadcasts that this is a story about love—love which will end in violent tragedy.