Hero and heroine of a Babylonian love story related in Ovid 's Metamorphoses .
Their parents forbade them to meet, so they communicated through a hole in the wall between their two houses before at last deciding to run away together. They agreed to meet at a mulberry tree. Arriving first, Thisbe was scared away by a lion, which shredded the veil she dropped when she fled. Pyramus, finding the veil, believed her dead and stabbed himself; she returned and, finding Pyramus dying, killed herself. The fruit of the mulberry tree, white until then, was stained dark purple by the lovers' blood.