The Tragic Love Story of Pyramus and Thisbe

    The story...

                Pyramus was known as the most handsome young man in all of Babylonia, and Thisbe the most fairest maid. Each came from different families whose only connection was their adjourning houses. At a neighborhood gathering, Pyramus and Thisbe met and immediately fell in love. They soon wished to get married, but their parents forbade it. However, this did not discourage Pyramus or Thisbe but only strengthened their love for one another. The lovers found a way to communicate to each other through a crack in the wall that parted the two houses. At every spare chance they could get, they would exchange words of love. Soon, they could no longer bear to be parted by a wall and planned to meet secretly one night under the shade of a mulberry tree. 

    Thisbe was the first to arrive that night. However, she soon spotted a lioness whose mouth was bloody from the cattle it had slain. Frightened for her life, Thisbe ran. She didn't notice that she had dropped her veil along the way, which the lioness immediately pounced on. Eventually, Pyramus came to the mulberry tree. Upon seeing the stained veil lying upon the ground, he  assumed that Thisbe had been killed. Grief-stricken, Pyramus fell onto his sword. As he laid on the ground dying, the blood that flowed from his body turned the white fruit of the tree to a dark red.

    Hurrying back so that she won't miss her love, Thisbe is horrified of the site of Pyramus as he lays dying. Pyramus sees her in a last effort and then dies.  Upset by Pyramus's death, she takes Pyramus's sword and falls onto it, killing herself.

    From then on the color of the mulberry fruit turns dark red when it is ripe. As for Pyramus and Thisbe, they were buried in the same urn and perhaps even reunited in heaven.

My Review of this Story and its Relationship to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Back to my Homepage