Tiresias

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Tiresias is the blind seer of Thebes: the prophet whose outer sight was taken and whose knowledge of hidden and future things was given in its place. He stands across the whole span of Greek storytelling, from Homer through the Athenian tragedians to the late mythographers, as the type of the one who knows what others cannot — and is rarely thanked for saying it. The Thebans set him at the elbow of their kings for seven generations, from Cadmus the city’s founder down through the house of Laius; he is the figure a ruler summons when the omens have already turned, and abuses when the answer is not the one wanted. Where Cassandra is the prophet no one believes, Tiresias is the prophet whose word is heard, understood, and refused.

Two stories for one gift

The myths give two irreconcilable accounts of how the gift came, and the ancient sources do not agree on which.

In the first, Tiresias came upon two snakes coupling on a mountainside — Mount Cithaeron in the Hesiodic Melampodia, Mount Cyllene in Apollodorus — and struck them, and was turned into a woman. He lived as a woman for years, by some tellings seven; by others he married and bore children. Then he found the snakes again, struck again, and was changed back into a man. Because he alone had lived the whole of both lives, Zeus and Hera called on him to settle a quarrel of the marriage bed: which of the two sexes takes the greater pleasure in love. Zeus held it was the woman; Hera, the man. Tiresias answered for the woman, and not by a little — in the Melampodia fragment preserved through Hesiod, he apportions the pleasure of love at ten parts, of which a man enjoys one and a woman all ten. Hera, exposed and angered, struck him blind. Zeus could not undo the act of another god — this is the law the story turns on, that no Olympian unmakes what another has made — and so gave him in recompense the gift of prophecy and a life stretched across many generations of mortals.

In the second account the blinding has nothing to do with Hera or with the doubled life. The seer Pherecydes told it, and Apollodorus preserves it: Chariclo, Tiresias’s mother, was a companion dear to Athena, and one day Tiresias came on the goddess bathing and saw her naked. The penalty was fixed and impersonal — whoever looks on an immortal unbidden is blinded — and Athena laid her hands over his eyes. When Chariclo begged her to undo it, the goddess could not give back the sight; but she cleansed his ears so that he understood the cries of birds, the oldest of the diviner’s instruments, and gave him a staff of cornel-wood with which he walked as surely as the seeing. The fullest and most charged telling of this version is Callimachus’s fifth Hymn, On the Bath of Pallas, where the whole episode is framed by the women of Argos preparing to wash the goddess’s image, and Athena’s grief for the boy and for his mother is the emotional center of the poem.

The change of sex is the detail that has drawn the most later attention, and the fullest narrative of it is Ovid’s, in the third book of the Metamorphoses, where the Roman poet tells the snakes, the seven years as a woman, the return, and the fatal verdict in the gods’ wager; Ovid adds the coda that the blinding came first and the gift of foresight after, so that the same scene that costs Tiresias his eyes is the one that opens his inner sight. Across both traditions — Hera’s anger and Athena’s law — the architecture is identical: a sight gained for a sight surrendered, foreknowledge purchased at the price of the eyes. The transaction is the meaning. To see what is coming, in this body of myth, is to be cut off from what is in front of one. The blindness is not an accident attached to the prophet; it is the form the prophecy takes.

The bearer of unwelcome truth

In the surviving drama Tiresias is above all the man who tells the powerful what they will not hear, and is punished for the telling. The pattern is steady enough that an Athenian audience seems to have arrived already expecting it.

In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, it is Tiresias who knows from the moment he is summoned that the king hunting the murderer of Laius is himself the murderer, and himself the pollution he means to drive out. He comes unwilling; he tries to keep silent; and when Oedipus goads him into speaking he says the thing plainly and is met with rage and the charge of treason — the seer accused of inventing his own prophecy for hire. Their confrontation sets the blind man who sees against the sighted king who is blind to the one fact that matters, and the literal and the figurative trade places before the scene is over. By the end of the play Oedipus has put out his own eyes, and the exchange Tiresias embodies — knowledge for sight — is enacted on the king’s own face.

In the Antigone the same figure returns to the same kind of king. Tiresias reads the failing omens — birds that scream and tear at one another, a burnt offering that will not catch, altars and hearths across Thebes fouled by the carrion of the unburied Polynices — and warns Creon that the city is sick because the ruler has set his decree above the law of the dead. Creon answers as Oedipus answered, with the accusation that the prophet has been bought; he relents, but he relents too late, and the deaths of his son and his wife are the price of the delay. In Euripides’ Bacchae the role is gentler and no less ignored: the aged Tiresias and old Cadmus put on the fawnskin and take up the thyrsus to go and dance for the new god Dionysus, and the young king Pentheus mocks the two old men as senseless before the god destroys him. Tiresias’s counsel there — that those whom the god’s madness touches have no small share of prophecy — is wisdom Pentheus is constitutionally unable to take. The shape does not vary: the seer sees, the powerful refuse to hear, and the refusal is the tragedy. He is the standing rebuke to the man who mistakes power for knowing, which is why the tradition keeps placing him in the path of kings.

The mind that survives the body

His strangest appearance is also his earliest. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey — the nekuia, the journey to the land of the dead — the witch Circe tells Odysseus that he cannot find his way home until he has gone down to the house of Hades and put his question to the shade of Tiresias. Among all the dead, the prophet alone has been allowed by Persephone, queen of the underworld, to keep his mind and his reason intact; the rest of the dead are mere flickering shadows that drift without understanding. So Odysseus sails to the edge of the world, digs the trench, and gives the dark blood that lets the dead speak — and Tiresias comes, still bearing the golden staff, and lays out the road home and the manner of the end that waits for the hero far inland, where men know nothing of the sea.

The image is exact, and it is the oldest thing said about him. Prophecy here is not foresight added to a living mind; it is a kind of knowing that outlasts the body altogether, the single form of awareness the underworld does not dissolve. This is the strand of the figure that touches the deeper Greek thinking about the soul and its persistence — and it sets Tiresias in company with the other Greek travelers between the living and the dead, with Orpheus who went down after Eurydice and came back without her, with Odysseus who went down to ask and came back to sail on. The descent of the living to consult the dead is a recurring mythic motif rather than a procedure; on the narrower idea of summoning or questioning the dead for what they know, see necromancy, and on Tiresias’s wider craft of the seer, see divination and the larger frame of prophecy. His daughter Manto carried the gift after him, and the line of Theban and later seers traced itself back to his name; the oracular tradition that the Greeks centered on Apollo and on Delphi was institutional where Tiresias was personal, but both rested on the same conviction — that the future is legible to the right kind of eye, and that the eye is rarely the one that can also see the present.

Texts, editions, and afterlife

Tiresias is a figure of myth, not a person the historian can place; the question with him is never whether he lived but what the Greeks were working through in him. He survives only in the texts, and the texts are scattered across the whole tradition, no two telling the same shape.

The two origin myths reach modern readers through a handful of primary sources. The sex-change and the wager belong to Hesiod’s lost Melampodia, surviving in fragments quoted by later writers and gathered in the public-domain Loeb volume of Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (Loeb Classical Library 57, 1914). The Athena variant is preserved by the mythographer Apollodorus, whose Library gives both accounts side by side — the Pherecydes story of the bath and the Hesiodic story of the snakes — in Apollodorus, Library 3.6.7, J. G. Frazer’s Loeb translation hosted on Perseus. The bath itself is told most fully by Callimachus in the third-century-BCE Hymn 5, On the Bath of Pallas; the underworld consultation is the oldest layer of all, in Homer, Odyssey 11, A. T. Murray’s Loeb text on Perseus, where Circe assigns the descent and Persephone’s gift is named. The tragic Tiresias lives in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone and in Euripides’ Bacchae, in Gilbert Murray’s public-domain verse translation at Project Gutenberg. Ovid’s Metamorphoses 3 gives the change between sexes the form most Western readers inherit.

Modern scholarship has read the figure less as a character than as a node where several Greek anxieties converge. Luc Brisson’s Le Mythe de Tirésias: essai d’analyse structurale (Leiden: Brill, 1976) remains the standard monographic study, collecting some eighteen mythical narratives across the variant traditions and arguing for the coherence of the sex-change motif within Greek conceptions of seercraft; Nicole Loraux’s The Experiences of Tiresias: The Feminine and the Greek Man (trans. Paula Wissing, Princeton University Press, 1995) takes the doubled life as the entry point for a study of how the Greek male defined himself in relation to the feminine. Common to the readings is the recurring shape itself: the one who sees what others cannot is the one set apart — by blindness, by a doubled life, or by death — as though the knowledge and the separation were the same gift.

That shape proved durable far beyond Greece. The most consequential modern reuse is T. S. Eliot’s, who made Tiresias the still center of The Waste Land (1922) and wrote in his own note that, though a mere spectator and not properly a character, Tiresias is the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest, the figure in whom the two sexes meet — and that what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem. The blind seer who has lived as man and woman, who has been among the dead and come back knowing, was the natural emblem for a poem about a civilization that has seen everything and can save no one — a fitting inheritance for a figure who was always, from the Odyssey forward, the one who watches and tells and is not heeded.

The recurring image is the one in the Odyssey, and it is the strangest and the oldest: a mind that goes on knowing after the body is gone.

→ Related: Divination · Eurydice · Cassandra · Prophecy · Odysseus · Persephone · Orpheus · Oedipus · Necromancy · Delphi