Tiresias

Apollodorus introduces Tiresias as a Theban soothsayer, son of Everes and the nymph Chariclo, descended from Udaeus, one of the Sown Men who sprang from the dragon's teeth. He was blind, and Apollodorus admits that the stories of how he lost his sight differ. Some said the gods blinded him for revealing their secrets to men.

Pherecydes, as Apollodorus reports him, blamed Athena. Chariclo was dear to the goddess, and Tiresias saw Athena naked. She covered his eyes with her hands and he lost his sight. When Chariclo begged her to undo it, Athena could not, so she cleansed his ears to let him understand the birds. She also gave him a staff of cornel-wood to walk with. Callimachus tells the same story in his hymn on the Bath of Pallas, set at a spring on Mount Helicon.

The other story Apollodorus credits to Hesiod. Tiresias saw two snakes coupling on Mount Cyllene, wounded them, and was changed from a man into a woman. When he saw the same snakes again, he became a man once more. So when Hera and Zeus argued over whether women or men take more pleasure in love, they asked him. He said that of ten parts, men enjoy one and women nine. Hera blinded him for it, and Zeus gave him the art of prophecy.

He lived a very long life and served Thebes across several reigns. Apollodorus says Amphitryon learned from him that Zeus had slept with Alcmene, and Pindar has him foretell the labours of the infant Heracles. In the war of the Seven against Thebes, he told the Thebans they would win if Creon's son Menoeceus gave himself to Ares. Menoeceus killed himself before the gates.

Sophocles makes him the voice of truth that kings refuse to hear. In Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus summons him to name the killer of Laius. Tiresias at first refuses, then says Oedipus himself is the man and foretells his blindness and exile. In Antigone, he reports birds tearing each other and sacrifices that will not burn, and warns Creon that the Furies lie in wait for him for denying Antigone's brother burial.

He died when Thebes fell to the sons of the Seven. Apollodorus says Tiresias advised the Thebans to send a herald to the Argives and flee by night. At the spring of Tilphusa he drank and died. The Argives then sent his daughter Manto to Apollo at Delphi as part of their spoils.

Death did not end his work. In the Odyssey, Circe tells Odysseus that Persephone let Tiresias alone keep his reason in the house of Hades. Odysseus sails to the edge of the underworld, and the seer comes up with a golden staff to drink the blood. He warns of Poseidon's anger and the cattle of Helios. He also foretells the suitors' deaths, a last journey inland with an oar, and a gentle death far from the sea.

Euripides gives him two very different scenes. In the Bacchae, he and the old Cadmus put on fawn-skins and ivy to dance for Dionysus, and Tiresias lectures King Pentheus on the new god's power. Cadmus adds the fate of Actaeon, torn apart by his own hounds for boasting he hunted better than Artemis. Pentheus orders his seat of augury torn down. In the Phoenissae, Tiresias arrives led by his daughter and tells Creon that Thebes will be saved only if his son Menoeceus is sacrificed to appease Ares.

Ovid sets the Hera story in a lighter key. In the Metamorphoses, Jupiter and Juno joke about pleasure after too much nectar, and Tiresias is chosen as judge. Ovid adds that he struck the snakes with his staff and stayed a woman for seven autumns. Hyginus says Jupiter gave him seven lives to live in return for his sight.

Ovid then makes him the first seer of the Narcissus and Echo story. Asked whether the infant Narcissus would reach old age, Tiresias answers yes, if he never comes to know himself. Pausanias records a bird-observatory of Tiresias still shown at Thebes, and a grave of Tiresias by the spring of Tilphusa, near Haliartus.