Tiresias - Overview, Tiresias and Thebes, Death, In post-classical literature, Sources

In Greek mythology, a blind Theban prophet, who takes a prominent part in Sophocles' plays about Oedipus and Antigone. Later legends account for his wisdom by saying that he had experienced the life of both sexes.

In Greek mythology, Tiresias (also transliterated as Teiresias) was a blind prophet famous for changing his sex, the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo.

Overview

Tiresias was a priest of Zeus. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes; All could then have been well, but Tiresias was drawn into an argument between Hera and her husband Zeus. However Zeus and Hera asked him to settle the question of which sex, male or female, experienced more pleasure during intercourse, as Tiresias had experienced both. Hera was furious, and instantly struck him blind - Zeus couldn't do anything to stop her - but he did give Tiresias the gift of second sight.

An alternative story in Callimachus' poem "The Bathing of Pallas" has it that Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked.

Stripped of its narrative and anecdotal and causal connections, the mythic figure of Tiresias combines several archaic elements: the blind seer;

Tiresias's background was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. Greek mythology contained many hermaphroditic figures (including Hermaphroditus), but Tiresias was fully male and then fully female. Therefore, Tiresias offered Zeus and Hera evidence and gained the gift of male and female priestly prophecy.

As a seer, Tiresias was "a common title for soothsayers throughout Greek legendary history" (Graves 1960, 105.5). In Greek literature, Tiresias's pronouncements are always gnomic but never wrong. Often when his name is attached to a mythic prophecy, it is introduced simply to supply a personality to the generic example of a seer, not by any inherent connection of Tiresias with the myth: thus it is Tiresias who tells Amphytrion of Zeus and Alcmena and warns the mother of Narcissus that the boy will thrive as long as he never knows himself.

Tiresias and Thebes

Tiresias appears as the name of a recurring character in several stories and Greek tragedies concerning the legendary history of Thebes. 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.

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. At first, Tiresias refuses to give a direct answer and instead hints that the killer is someone Oedipus really does not wish to find. However after being provoked to anger by Oedipus' accusation that Tiresias had a hand in the murder, he reveals that in fact it was Oedipus himself who had (unwittingly) committed the crime.

Tiresias also appears in Sophocles' Antigone.

Tiresias and his prophesy are also involved in the story of the Epigoni.

Death

Tiresias died after drinking the water from the spring Tilphussa, where he was struck by an arrow of Apollo. If this title had survived the fall of LMIII Crete, then it could have evolved into *Terasias in Doric and, possibly, *Te[i]resias in Ionic.Lesson 26: Mycenaean and Late Cycladic Religion and Religious Architecture

In post-classical literature

The figure of Tiresias has been much-invoked by fiction writers and poets. Since Tiresias is both the greatest seer of the Classical mythos, a figure cursed by the gods, and both man and woman, he has been very useful to authors.

In The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto XX), Dante sees Tiresias in the fourth pit of the eighth circle of Hell (the circle is for perpetrators of fraud and the fourth pit being the location for soothsayers or diviners.) He was condemned to walk for eternity with his head twisted toward his back;

More recently, "Tiresias" was the title of a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson.

The French composer Francis Poulenc also wrote an opera called Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias") based on Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealist text.

Frank Herbert also uses the mythic characteristics of Tiresias in his second Dune novel, Dune Messiah, where the protagonist Paul Atreides loses his sight but has prophetic powers to counter this stemming from insights into both the male and female part of the psyche.

Amy Seham, drama professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, wrote a musical entitled "Tiresias" in 1999, with music by Chanda Walker and Kira Theimer.

Tiresias as a motif of doubleness (male/female) also occurs in the writing of Rohinton Mistry.

Tiresias also shows up in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (novel).

Haruki Murakami's novel, Kafka on the Shore, has a character called Oshima, who is an androgynous seer, like Tiresias.

Sources

Tiresias appears in the following literary classics:

Oedipus the King, Sophocles Antigone, Sophocles The Bacchae, Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides Phoenician Women, Euripides The Odyssey, Homer Metamorphoses, Ovid Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus Fifth Hymn ("The Bath of Pallas"), Callimachus Paradise Lost, John Milton Tiresias, Alfred Tennyson

Tiresias appears in the following song lyrics:

"The Cinema Show" from the 1973 album Selling England by the Pound by progressive rock group Genesis.

Take a little trip back with Father Tiresias, Listen to the old one speak of all he has lived through.

"Castle Walls" from the album The Grand Illusion by Styx

The film Tiresia is inspired by this myth.