Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes from Homer to tragedy
Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes: the two versions of the myth of his blindness, his consultation in the Odyssey and his role in Sophocles' tragedies.
If Cassandra is the prophetess no one listens to, Tiresias is the seer everyone consults and few wish to hear. Son of the nymph Chariclo and of Everes, descended from one of the Spartoi born from the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus, the Theban seer spans several generations of the mythical history of Thebes. In epic and tragedy he almost always plays the same part: the blind old man who sees what kings refuse to see.
Two stories about his blindness
The ancients knew at least two explanations for his blindness. In the first, told by Callimachus in the hymn On the Bath of Pallas, the young Tiresias chanced upon Athena bathing at a spring. The goddess, a friend of his mother Chariclo, could not revoke the law that punished anyone who saw the gods without their consent, and took away his sight; in return she gave him the ability to understand the language of birds and a staff that guided him as though he could see.
The second version, going back to a lost Hesiodic poem and made famous by Ovid in the third book of the Metamorphoses, is stranger. Tiresias struck two mating snakes and was turned into a woman; seven years later, striking the snakes again, he became a man once more. Called upon to settle a dispute between Zeus and Hera over whether man or woman found greater pleasure in love, he sided with Zeus. Hera blinded him, and Zeus compensated him with prophecy and an extremely long life.
A voice from Hades
In the Odyssey Tiresias enjoys a unique privilege. Circe explains to Odysseus that he alone among the dead has been allowed by Persephone to keep his mind, while the other shades wander without understanding. For this reason the hero, in the eleventh book, must travel to the edge of the world and make offerings to the dead in order to question him about his return to Ithaca.
After drinking the blood of the victims, the old seer announces the trials awaiting Odysseus: the anger of Poseidon, the ban on touching the cattle of the Sun on the island of Thrinacia, the suitors in the palace. He also foretells a final journey to people who know nothing of the sea and a death in old age, described in words that the ancients themselves already interpreted in different ways. It is one of the passages in which Homeric prophecy appears most detailed and personal.
The seer of tragedy
In fifth-century BC Athens Tiresias became a recurring stage character. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King it is he who reveals to the ruler that the culprit being sought is Oedipus himself, provoking the king's anger and an accusation of conspiracy. In the Antigone he warns Creon after watching the birds from his ancient augural seat, and the ill-omened signs of the sacrifice announce the catastrophe that will shortly strike the royal family.
Euripides, in the Bacchae, shows him with the aged Cadmus setting out to celebrate Dionysus, vainly advising Pentheus to welcome the new god. According to the mythographic tradition collected in Apollodorus' Library, Tiresias died after Thebes was taken by the Epigoni, drinking the icy water of the spring Tilphussa as he fled the city.
His legacy passed to his daughter Manto, herself a seer, whom legend links to Apollo's sanctuary at Claros and, in the Latin tradition taken up by Dante, to the origin of Mantua. Dante places Tiresias and Manto in the fourth pouch of Hell, among the diviners forced to walk with their faces turned backwards, a sign of how alive the Theban seer remained in the medieval imagination.