Pyramus and Thisbe, the lovers of Babylon and the blood-stained mulberry

Long before Romeo and Juliet, the ancient world knew the story of two young neighbours, kept apart by their families and united in death by a misunderstanding. It is the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, told by Ovid in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, at the beginning of the 1st century AD. It is also a legend about the origin of a colour: the dark colour of mulberries.

A crack in the wall

Ovid puts the story in the mouth of one of the daughters of Minyas, who refuse to take part in the rites of Bacchus and pass the time weaving and telling stories. The scene is Babylon, the city that, the poet says, Queen Semiramis had girded with walls of baked brick. Pyramus is the most handsome of young men, Thisbe the most admired of the maidens of the East, and their houses stand side by side.

Their parents forbid the marriage, but they cannot prevent love. The two discover a thin crack in the wall separating their homes and use it to speak in whispers. In the evening they say goodbye, each kissing their own side of the wall. At last, weary of prohibitions, they decide to flee the city by night.

The meeting under the mulberry

The place chosen for the meeting is the tomb of Ninus, the ancient king of Babylon, where a tall mulberry tree laden with snow-white fruit stands near a spring. Thisbe arrives first, wrapped in a veil. But a lioness that has just killed some oxen approaches the spring, her jaws stained with blood. Frightened, the girl flees into a cave and drops her veil.

Before leaving, the beast tears it with her bloody mouth. Soon after, Pyramus arrives, sees the lion's tracks and the stained veil, and believes that Thisbe has been devoured through his fault. He stabs himself with his sword beneath the mulberry, and the blood gushing from the wound stains the fruit of the tree dark.

The purple mulberries

Thisbe returns, recognises the tree only with difficulty because the berries have changed colour, and finds her beloved dying. Pyramus opens his eyes at the sound of her name and closes them for ever. The girl begs their parents to grant the two a single tomb, asks the mulberry to keep dark fruit in remembrance, and kills herself with the same sword.

The poet concludes that her prayers were granted: since then the fruit of the mulberry turns dark when it ripens, and the ashes of the two lovers rest in a single urn. The tale thus joins a love drama to an aetiological myth, that is, a legendary explanation of a natural phenomenon, following a pattern frequent in the Metamorphoses.

From Ovid to Shakespeare

In the Middle Ages the story was much loved: Geoffrey Chaucer retold it in The Legend of Good Women and Dante alluded to it in the Purgatorio. In 1618 the Spaniard Luis de Góngora devoted a burlesque poem to it. Shakespeare staged it twice: as the distant model of Romeo and Juliet and as the clumsy play of the craftsmen in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Whether read as tragedy or as parody, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe established several elements that would return throughout love literature: hostile families, the secret meeting, the fatal misunderstanding and the death that reunites what life had divided. It is no surprise that, two thousand years later, the crack in the wall remains one of the most recognisable images of thwarted love, known even to those who have never read Ovid.