READER REQUEST SPECIAL
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Imagine two houses in Ancient Babylon. A wall separates them. Behind it live two young people forbidden from being together.
But ironically, the very wall designed to keep them apart has a crack. Through it, they whisper to each other.
Their names were Pyramus and Thisbe.
They had fallen in love despite their families' disapproval, turning the small crack in the wall into their secret meeting place. They could not see each other, but they could hear each other's voices, and over time, those whispers became enough to keep their relationship alive.
Eventually, they decided that whispering through a wall was not enough. They planned to meet outside the city, beneath a mulberry tree near the tomb of Ninus.
Thisbe arrived first.
Then everything went wrong.
A lioness soon appeared near the tree, its mouth still stained from a recent kill. Frightened, Thisbe ran and hid, leaving her veil behind.
The lioness found it, tearing and staining the fabric before disappearing.
Thisbe was still alive.
Pyramus, however, did not know that.
When he arrived, he saw the lioness's tracks and found Thisbe's bloodied veil. To him, the evidence seemed obvious: something terrible had happened to her.
He believed she was dead.
Overcome with grief, Pyramus killed himself.
When Thisbe returned and found Pyramus dying, she finally understood what had happened. But by then, it was too late. She chose to die as well, ending their story beneath the same tree where they had planned to begin their life together.
Ovid's story ends with one final transformation: the mulberries, once white, become dark red from the lovers' blood, forever carrying the memory of what happened there.
But there is something strange about this tragedy.
Pyramus did not actually see Thisbe die. He saw a few pieces of evidence: a bloodied veil, the tracks of a lioness, and no sign of Thisbe herself. From those fragments, he created an explanation and he treated it as fact.
Thisbe was not dead. But Pyramus did not know that.
And later, Thisbe faced the same problem. She found Pyramus dead and had to interpret what she was seeing. Her conclusion led to the final tragedy.
In other words, neither lover had the complete story.
They had fragments.
And they filled in the gaps.
That might seem like a small detail in an ancient love story. But it is actually what makes Pyramus and Thisbe so interesting.
Because humans have always had to make sense of things they cannot fully see.
Pyramus and Thisbe didn't stay beneath that mulberry tree. Their story kept traveling.
Centuries later, its echoes could be seen in one of the most famous love stories in English literature: Romeo and Juliet. The parallels are hard to miss: young lovers separated by family conflict, a secret relationship, a fatal misunderstanding, and two lovers who ultimately die because they believe they have lost each other.
But Shakespeare did more than simply repeat the story. He transformed an older tradition into something of his own.
And he even returned to Pyramus and Thisbe directly in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where a group of amateur actors perform their tragedy as a comedy. The “wall” separating the lovers is literally played by an actor.
The same story can be tragic, romantic, or ridiculous.
Sometimes, it all depends on how we tell it.
Pyramus and Thisbe may have lived thousands of years ago, but the way they interpreted the world feels surprisingly familiar.
We are constantly given fragments of information about other people. A message without a reply. A photograph. A screenshot. A rumor. A few seconds of a conversation.
And then we fill in the gaps.
Someone doesn't answer your message, and you decide they're angry. You see a photograph of someone's perfect holiday, and assume their life is perfect. You hear one side of an argument and feel like you understand the entire story.
The information itself might be real. The problem is what we build around it.
Pyramus really did find Thisbe's veil. The veil really was covered in blood. But none of that meant that Thisbe was dead.
In a way, the veil became a facade: something real that seemed to reveal the truth while actually hiding it.
And perhaps that is the uncomfortable part of the myth.
We don't always need someone else to create a facade for us.
Sometimes, we create one ourselves from the fragments we are given.
The danger comes when we forget that our interpretation is still an interpretation.
Pyramus did not die because he knew Thisbe was dead. He died because he believed he knew.
That distinction is what makes their story so unsettling.
We are always going to see only pieces of other people's lives. We will make assumptions, interpret signs, and build explanations from what we have. We cannot know everything.
But perhaps we can learn to pause before turning an interpretation into a certainty.
A bloodied veil is not the person beneath it.
A photograph is not an entire life.
A screenshot is not an entire story.
And sometimes, the most important question we can ask ourselves is simply:
What if I don't actually know?
My Rabbit Hole Sources
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