Pyramus and Thisbe
When we hear the name ‘Babylon’ we think of a Middle Eastern civilization famed for ribaldry and excess. Its Hanging Gardens were one of the original Seven Wonders of the World and for a time Babylon was the largest city in the world.fn1 The Babylonian Empire took in much of Asia Minor, indeed some believe that this story really took place in Cilicia, the kingdom that Cilix founded before he joined Cadmus and the other sons of Agenor in their quest for Europa. Ovid, however, in his version of the tale, is happy to locate the action plum in the centre of Babylon and so that is where I have placed it too.
In Babylon, then, lived two families who had been feuding, no one quite remembers why, for generations. Their great palaces stood next to each other on the main street of the city, but the children of each household were raised as enemies, forbidden so much as to speak, write or sign to one another.
One of the families had a son called PYRAMUS and the other a daughter called THISBE who somehow fell in love with each other despite the obstacles in their way. They had discovered a small hole in a shared wall between their adjoining homes. Through this aperture they whispered, swapping views of life, poetry and music until they found themselves falling very deeply in love. The hole in the wall was too small to allow them to touch, but the heat of their young and ardent passion could be breathed from one mouth to another through that benevolent chink, intensified by the forbidden nature of their feelings and their thrillingly unbridgeable proximity.
This exchange of hot, youthful breath enflamed them so much that one night, maddened beyond endurance, they arranged each to escape their respective palaces and meet at night in the grounds of the tomb of Pyramus’s ancestor, the Assyrian King NINUS, founder of the great city of Nineveh.
And so, the following evening, the nimble and quick-witted Thisbe slips past the guardians of her room and the sentries on duty outside her father’s palace and is soon beyond the city walls, built all those years ago by her ancestor, Queen SEMIRAMIS. When she reaches the trysting-place, Thisbe encounters not her lover Pyramus, but a savage lion whose jaws drip with the blood of its recent prey, an ox. Frightened by its roars, Thisbe runs from the cemetery. In the hurry and panic of her flight she drops her veil. The lion approaches the veil, snuffles it, takes it between its jaws and shakes it from side to side, staining it with some of the ox-blood on its muzzle before letting it fall back to the ground, giving one last roar and padding off into the night.
A little later Pyramus arrives on the scene and sets himself to wait for his beloved under a tall mulberry tree loaded with its heavy summer burden of snow-white fruit. A shaft of moonlight shoots between the tree’s branches and illuminates Thisbe’s veil, which is lying on the ground all smeared and dabbled with gore. Pyramus snatches it up. Horrorstruck, he can make out the embroidered crest of Thisbe’s family in the bloodstained linen, and more than that, he recognizes the scent of the girl with whom he has exchanged the fierce fever of love’s breath so many times. Paw prints on the ground bear witness to the presence of a lion.
Blood, paw prints, the family crest, the unmistakable scent of Thisbe herself: the clear and tragic meaning of it all bursts in on Pyramus. With a cry of despair he draws his sword and stabs himself deep in the stomach, ripping the wound wider from side to side in his hurry to join his dead beloved. Blood spurts up from him like a fountain, dyeing the white mulberries purple.
‘You took my beloved Thisbe away before we could be united for the short span of our lives,’ Pyramus cries to the heavens, ‘so let us be one in the endless night of eternal death!’ With these noble words he expires upon the ground.fn2
Enter Thisbe. In the dead hands of Pyramus she sees her own veil, smeared and spattered with blood. She sees the lion’s paw prints and reads all too clearly the story written there.
‘Oh gods, can you have been so jealous of our love that you could not grant us even one short moment of happiness?’ she cries.
She sees Pyramus’s sword. It is still hot and wet with his blood. She throws herself upon it, plunging it deep into her belly with a cry of triumph and ecstasy in one of the most Freudian suicides ever.
When the two families are taken to the site of the tragedy they fall weeping on each other’s necks and beg forgiveness. The feud is over. The lovers’ bodies are cremated and their ashes mixed together in a single urn.
As for their spirits – well, Pyramus was turned into the river that bore his name for millennia and Thisbe into a spring whose waters run into it. The flow of the Pyramus (now called the Ceyhan) has been dammed for hydroelectric energy, so the power of the two lovers now goes to light Turkish homes.
Moreover, in honour of the couple’s love and sacrifice, the gods decreed that the mulberry fruit would from that moment on be always a deep crimson purple: the colour of their passion and their blood.
Galateas
Acis and Galatea
Amongst the many daughters of the Oceanid Doris and the sea god Nereus, was one Nereid called GALATEA. Named for her milk-white complexion she was adored by POLYPHEMUS, a Cyclops. Not one of the original Cyclopes – Polyphemus was the savage and ugly offspring of Poseidon and the Oceanid THOOSA.
Galatea herself loved ACIS, a Sicilian shepherd boy of simple charm and beauty. Though the son of the river nymph SYMAETHIS and the god Pan, Acis was only mortal. One day the jealous Polyphemus caught sight of Acis and Galatea in each other’s arms and hurled a boulder down onto the boy, crushing and killing him. The grieving Galatea was able to call upon sufficient power and resources, or perhaps had enough friends on Olympus, to be able to turn Acis into an immortal river spirit with whom she consorts for eternity. Their story is the subject of Handel’s pastoral opera Acis and Galatea.
Galatea II
While on the subject of girls called Galatea there are two more worth meeting.
PANDION of Phaestos in Crete had a son, LAMPROS, who married a Galatea. Lampros had no interest in fathering girl-children and told his wife that if she gave birth to a daughter she was to kill it and they would keep trying until she bore the son he craved. Their first child was a beautiful baby girl. Galatea did not have the heart to kill her – what mother would? – and told her husband that the baby had been born a healthy boy, and that she wanted to call him LEUCIPPOS (white horse).
Lampros took his wife at her word without bothering with any anatomical inspections and thus, raised male, Leucippos grew up to be a fine, intelligent, universally liked and accepted boy. Teenage years approached, however, and Galatea became more and more afraid that her beloved child’s lush natural curves and striking lack of any downy growth on the chin must eventually give the game away to Lampros, who was not the kind of man to overlook such a deception.
For safety’s sake Galatea took Leucippos and sought refuge in a temple of Leto (the Titaness mother of Apollo and Artemis), where she prayed that her daughter might change her sex. Leto answered the prayer and on the instant Leucippos was transformed into a masculine youth. Hairs pushed through where they should on a male, the correct bulges appeared, the incorrect bulges disappeared. Lampros was none the wiser and they all lived happily ever after.
For generations after this, the city of Phaestos celebrated a festival they called the Ekdusia.fn1 In this ritual all young Phaestian boys lived amongst women and girls, wore female clothes and had to swear an oath of citizenship before they could graduate from their agela, or youth corps, and acquire full male dress and status.fn2