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OvidPyramus and Thisbe
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 8A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Flawed—But Human—Love
While the Metamorphoses touches on a variety of subjects, it often returns to the subject of love. Myths with erotic themes dominate the text. That being said, in contrast to Ovid’s earlier works like the Amores—in which love represents a fun, if sometimes painful, force for lovers—love in the Metamorphoses carries a distinctly darker tone. It is almost always a destructive, irrational force. Most romantic encounters in the Metamorphoses are a hodgepodge of standard awful elements: they are non-consensual; unnatural (e.g. between animals and people, between blood relatives); one-sided; or end in despair.
Through this lens, Ovid’s “happier” love stories deserve special consideration. While Pyramus and Thisbe’s romance ends in tragedy, it is remarkably free from the Metamorphoses’ usual, disturbing erotic elements. Pyramus and Thisbe are, for all appearances, societal equals. There is no obvious power differential between them, and both participate in the affair with full consent. Perhaps most striking of all, they are selfless in their love, even to the point of self-sacrifice. Pyramus and Thisbe not only fully consider the needs and happiness of their lover—they prioritize their lover’s well-being over their own.
These dynamics can be explained in part by Pyramus and Thisbe’s identity as mortals. Their story is the first in the epic to concentrate exclusively on love between human beings. Most of Metamorphoses’ romantic affairs occur between humans and gods, to devastating effect for the mortals. While divine rapists prioritize their own pleasure—and usually contribute to the demise of their partner in the process—Ovid’s human lovers often (though not always) display devotion characterized by mutual commitment.
Ovid’s tone in “Pyramus and Thisbe” is certainly playful; his teenage lovers are melodramatic (maybe even a little silly). But at the same time, they display incredible bravery and support for each other, even in the face of death. While their passion is immature, it is not cruel or disordered, and their deaths are more attributable to a chain of unfortunate circumstances than their sins or guilt. Ovid caps off his story by honoring their devotion: both their parents and the gods recognize their love and, as Thisbe requested, commemorate it permanently.
The Broken Pipe: Hallmarks of Ovid’s Style
Much scholarly attention has been given to a specific moment in Pyramus’s suicide scene. When Pyramus stabs himself—imitating the self-sacrificing heroes and lovers of the literary past—he botches the job. Blood spurts up violently from the wound, splattering the white berries of the mulberry tree. In an infamous simile, Ovid compares the way blood gushes from the wound to the way water gushes from a broken pipe (Lines 120-26).
Practically speaking, of course, Ovid needs the blood to hit the berries: it is the blood of the lovers which will transform their color, fulfilling the aetiological purpose of the story. If Pyramus is lying prostrate under the mulberry tree, the blood needs to make some distance to hit the branches. That being said, there were other options. The blood could soak the roots, perhaps—a suitable enough explanation for the transformation of the berries, if Ovid wanted to avoid being silly. There is something more at work here. Ovid’s simile of the broken pipe, in fact, is highly typical of his poetic style in the Metamorphoses. It is a useful lens for exploring three important aspects of Ovid’s poetic voice: his fondness for banality, gore, and humorous sexual innuendo.
First, comparing a wound to a burst pipe is supremely unpoetic. It is anachronistic, too. Ovid took the time to paint a storybook scene in the faraway land of Babylon, but jars his Roman reader back to earth with a very Roman image (by Ovid’s day, the Romans had developed an advanced pipe and sewage system). A more austere poet like Ovid’s contemporary, Virgil, would never mention these sorts of vulgar details, but Ovid likes to be playful with his poetic register. While he is fully capable of a more elevated, noble tone (as he displays in Book 10’s story of Orpheus and Eurydice, for example), he also pushed back against the sterility of tradition to poke a bit of fun at the epic genre.
Second, the graphic bloody details aestheticize the gruesome and macabre. Virgil used gore tactfully in his Aeneid to underline the awful cost of civil war (See Study Guide of Aeneid) but Ovid takes it up a notch in the Metamorphoses. His epic delights in scenes a modern reader might describe as “body horror”: grotesque details of physical transformation and mutilation. Ovid’s literary successor, the Neronian poet Lucan, will take this theme to new extremes in his epic, Civil War.
Finally, Pyramus’s blood spurting wildly may have been intended to be a funny (if somewhat lowbrow) image. Modern media uses similar gags to great comedic effect; Pyramus’s gushing side wound is not unlike the squirting stumps of the humorously mutilated Black Knight in the 1975 comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The possibility of Ovid meaning to be a little funny here is bolstered by the obvious metaphorical connection between a broken pipe and male genitalia. When Ovid’s sex-obsessed teenager stabs himself, his wound spurts uncontrollably in “long leaping jets that cut the air” (Line 126). While the Latin vocabulary Ovid uses does not have erotic connotations per se, the sexual implications of the image are clear.
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