Pyramus and Thisbe
Pyramus and Thisbe
- Stephen J. Harrison
Subjects
- Latin Literature
- Roman Myth and Religion
Updated in this version
Text and bibliography updated to reflect current scholarship; keywords added.
Pyramus and Thisbe are the hero and heroine of a love story mainly known from Ovid, Met., 4. 55–165. They were next-door neighbours in Babylon, and, as their parents would not let them marry, they talked with each other through a crack in the party wall between the houses. Finally, they arranged to meet at Ninus’s tomb. There Thisbe was frightened by a lion coming from its kill; she dropped her cloak as she ran and the lion mauled it. Pyramus, finding the bloodstained cloak and supposing Thisbe dead, killed himself; she returned, found his body, and followed his example. Their blood stained a mulberry tree, whose fruit has ever since been black when ripe, in sign of mourning for them. The story is likely to be derived to some degree from Hellenistic sources, according to which the two lovers may have been transformed into a river and a stream, and can be linked with the eastern Mediterranean and the river Pyramus in Cilicia. Ovid’s narrative, told by the daughters of Minyas who show stereotypically ‘feminine’ romantic interests in Roman terms, may draw on a lost Greek novelistic source, as well as taking elements from the plots of new comedy (young neighbours in love). Ovid’s narrative is highly popular in art, especially in Pompeian wall paintings; it is notably picked up by Shakespeare in the 1590s, in comic form as the subject of the parodic play of the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in tragic form in its adaptation in the suicides of the protagonists in Romeo and Juliet.
Bibliography
- Rudd, Niall. “Pyramus and Thisbe in Shakespeare and Ovid.” In Creative Imitation and Latin Literature. Edited by D. West and A. J. Woodman, 173–193. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
- Holzberg, Niklas. “Ovids ‘Babyloniaka’ (Met. 4.55–166).” Wiener Studien 101 (1988): 265–277.
- Knox, Peter E. “Pyramus and Thisbe in Cyprus.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 92 (1989): 315–328.
- Linant de Bellefonds, Pascale. “Pyramos et Thisbe.” Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae 7.1 (1994): 605–607.
- Lightfoot, J. L. Parthenius: The Poetical Fragments and the “Erōtika pathēmata,” 537–540. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Stramaglia, Antonio. “Piramo e Tisbe di Ovidio?: PMich inv. 3793 e la narrativa d‘intrattenimento alla fine dell‘età tolemaica.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 134 (2001): 81–106.
- Shorrock, Robert. “Ovidian Plumbing in Metamorphoses 4.” Classical Quarterly 53 (2003): 624–627.
- Burrow, Colin. Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 537–540. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.