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The Legend of Thisbe:

Shakespeare did not invent in Romeo and Juliet the tale of the young lovers whose union is thwarted by their opposing parents and whose lives end in double suicide based on a misunderstanding. The story is as old as the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, acted as a play within a play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and told 1500 years before by the poet Ovid, who got it from the Greeks, who got it from the Near East.

Thisbe, a maiden of Babylon, was forbidden by her parents to marry her beloved Pyramus. The two lovers defied their families by exchanging vows through a chink in the wall which divided their houses, and plotted to elope together, fixing upon a white mulberry bush at the tomb of Ninus as the appointed spot. 

Arriving at the site, Thisbe was surprised by a lioness, fresh from the kill, and, in her haste to escape into a nearby cave, let slip her veil. The lioness mauled the veil, coating it with the blood of her prey. On his arrival, Pyramus discovered the cloth and believing it to be stained with the blood of his love, stabbed himself through the heart. 

Thisbe, coming out from hiding, found Pyramus' body and overcome with grief, threw herself upon his sword. Their mingled blood seeped into the ground and turned the fruit of the mulberry tree black as a sign of mourning for them. 
...

Metamorphoses: Book The Fourth
~ Ovid, Written 1 A.C.E. 
(frag)

            Aloud in words their thoughts they dare not break,
              But silent stand; and silent looks can speak.
      The fire of love the more it is supprest,
              The more it glows, and rages in the breast.
            When the division-wall was built, a chink
               Was left, the cement unobserv'd to shrink.
              So slight the cranny, that it still had been
              For centuries unclos'd, because unseen.
               But oh! what thing so small, so secret lies,
                   Which scapes, if form'd for love, a lover's eyes?
                   Ev'n in this narrow chink they quickly found
              A friendly passage for a trackless sound.
                   Safely they told their sorrows, and their joys,
              In whisper'd murmurs, and a dying noise,
                   By turns to catch each other's breath they strove,
              And suck'd in all the balmy breeze of love.
                   Oft as on diff'rent sides they stood, they cry'd,
              Malicious wall, thus lovers to divide!

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