The Metamorphoses of Ovid

Pyramus

Family: mortals · Role: lover of Thisbe · First appears: Fable 38

Life events

  • Pyramus and Thisbe’s fathers forbid their marriage despite their mutual love.(Fable38 · 📍 Babylon)
    • With: Thisbe
    • “They would have united themselves, too, by the tie of marriage, but their fathers forbade it.”
  • Pyramus and Thisbe arrange to evade their keepers and meet at Ninus’s tomb.(Fable38 · 📍 Babylon)
    • With: Thisbe
    • “they determine, in the silent night, to try to deceive their keepers, and to steal out of doors”
  • Pyramus finds Thisbe’s bloodstained veil and kills himself with his sword.(Fable38 · 📍 the tomb of Ninus)
    • “and then plunges the sword, with which he is girt, into his bowels”
  • Thisbe discovers Pyramus dead and kills herself with the same sword.(Fable38 · 📍 the tomb of Ninus)
    • With: Thisbe
    • “I will follow thee in thy death, and I shall be called the most unhappy cause and companion of thy fate”
  • Pyramus and Thisbe’s remains are placed together in one urn after their deaths.(Fable38 · 📍 the tomb of Ninus)
    • With: Thisbe
    • “and what was left of them, from the funeral pile, reposed in the same urn.”
  • The mulberry tree’s fruit turns black from the lovers’ blood as a lasting memorial.(Fable38 · 📍 the tomb of Ninus)
    • With: Thisbe
    • “For the color of the fruit, when it has fully ripened, is black”

Fable 38

  • courtship with Thisbe “Pyramus and Thisbe, the one the most beauteous of youths,[18] the other preferred before {all} the damsels that the East contained, lived in adjoining houses;”

Also listed in Mortals — Minor Figures

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