After his death he was visited in the underworld by Odysseus, to whom he gave valuable advice concerning the rest of his odyssey, specifically concerning the cattle of Helios, advice which Odysseus' men did not follow, to their peril.Like many figures from ancient mythology, the origin story of the blind prophet, Teiresias, could vary depending on the storyteller, location, and century. His shade descended to the Asphodel Meadows, the first level of Hades. Tiresias died after drinking water from the tainted spring Tilphussa, where he was struck by an arrow of Apollo. Outraged, Oedipus throws him out of the palace, but then afterwards realizes the truth. However, after being provoked to anger by Oedipus' accusation first that he has no foresight and then that Tiresias had a hand in the murder, he reveals that in fact it was Oedipus himself who had (unwittingly) committed the crime. At first, Tiresias refuses to give a direct answer and instead hints that the killer is someone Oedipus really does not wish to find. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus, the king of Thebes, calls upon Tiresias to aid in the investigation of the killing of the previous king Laius. Along with Cadmus, he dresses as a worshiper of Dionysus to go up the mountain to honour the new god with the Theban women in their Bacchic revels. In The Bacchae, by Euripides, Tiresias appears with Cadmus, the founder and first king of Thebes, to warn the current king Pentheus against denouncing Dionysus as a god. Tiresias appears as the name of a recurring character in several stories and Greek tragedies concerning the legendary history of Thebes. "So sentient is Tiresias, even in death," observes Marina Warner "that he comes up to Odysseus and recognizes him and calls him by name before he has drunk the black blood of the sacrifice even Odysseus' own mother cannot accomplish this, but must drink deep before her ghost can see her son for himself. Tiresias makes a dramatic appearance in the Odyssey, book XI, in which Odysseus calls up the spirits of the dead (the nekyia). Tiresias is presented as a complexly liminal figure, with a foot in each of many oppositions, mediating between the gods and mankind, male and female, blind and seeing, present and future, and this world and the Underworld. In Hellenistic and Roman times Tiresias' sex-change was embroidered upon and expanded into seven episodes, with appropriate amours in each, probably written by the Alexandrian Ptolemaeus Chennus, but attributed by Eustathius to Sostratus of Phanagoria's lost elegiac Tiresias. This ancient story is recorded in lost lines of Hesiod. As a result, Tiresias was released from his sentence and permitted to regain his masculinity. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes depending on the myth, either she made sure to leave the snakes alone this time, or, according to Hyginus, trampled on them. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a prostitute of great renown. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. Hera was not pleased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman. On Mount Cyllene in the Peloponnese, as Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes, he hit the pair a smart blow with his stick. How Tiresias obtained his information varied: sometimes, like the oracles, he would receive visions other times he would listen for the songs of birds, or ask for a description of visions and pictures appearing within the smoke of burnt offerings, and so interpret them. Tiresias participated fully in seven generations at Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus himself.Įighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson, fall into three groups: one, in two episodes, recounts Tiresias' sex-change and his encounter with Zeus and Hera a second group recounts his blinding by Athena a third, all but lost, seems to have recounted the misadventures of Tiresias. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo. In Greek mythology, Tiresias was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years.
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