Pyramus and Thisbe

Legendary Babylonian lovers whose tragedy was retold by the Roman poet Ovid in ‘Metamorphoses’. Thwarted by their parents' opposition and forced to communicate through a chink in a wall, the couple decided to elope. At their meeting place, Thisbe was pursued by a lioness who had just killed an ox, and dropped her veil – the creature tore it to pieces with its bloodstained jaws. Pyramus found the cloth and, assuming Thisbe was dead, stabbed himself; she in turn killed herself on his corpse.

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the ‘rude mechanicals’ perform the story as a farce for the nobles.

The lovers had agreed to meet under a mulberry tree by the tomb of Ninus, and its fruit, originally white, turned red after their death.