William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet out-staged its Italian, French and English narrative predecessors, which had themselves, formalized earlier sources of the lovers' tale. Angelo Romano has suggested that: an anonymous version of Pyramus and Thisbe, adapted from Book IV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and a translation into Italian of Musaeus' Hero and Leander, which was also widely known through the letters the two lovers exchange in Ovid's Heroides. Hatred and gender segregation are the background to the playing out of Romeo and Juliet's love and its consummation. A moment earlier, she had inverted the fusion of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus to emphasize the almost physical pain of division. In Pyramus and Thisbe moments of anguish, Juliet fears forms of death that threaten to pull her down in the pit of decay; in her moments of erotic ecstasy she aspires to a death akin to Hercules' apotheosis.