Tiresias

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Tiresias (disambiguation).
Everes redirects here. For the butterfly genus, see Everes (genus).
Tiresias appears to Odysseus during the nekyia of Odyssey xi, in this watercolor with tempera by the Anglo-Swiss Johann Heinrich Füssli, c. 1780-85

In Greek mythology, Tiresias (also transliterated as Teiresias Τειρεσίας) was a blind prophet of Thebes, famous for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo;[1] Tiresias participated in fully seven generations at Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus himself.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Eighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson,[2] 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.

Tiresias was a prophet of Zeus. According to the mythographic compendium Bibliotheke,[3] different stories were told of the cause of his blindness, the most direct being that he was simply blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets. An alternate story told by the poet Pherecydes was followed in Callimachus' poem "The Bathing of Pallas"; in it, Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked.[4] His mother, Chariclo, a nymph of Athena, begged her to undo her curse, but Athena could not; instead, she cleaned his ears,[3] giving him the ability to understand birdsong, thus the gift of augury.

On Mount Cyllene in the Peloponnese,[5] as Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes, he hit the pair a smart blow with his stick. Hera was not pleased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a prostitute of great renown. 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. As a result, Tiresias was released from his sentence and permitted to regain his masculinity. This ancient story is recorded in lost lines of Hesiod.[6]

In a separate episode,[7] Tiresias was drawn into an argument between Hera and her husband Zeus, on the theme of who has more pleasure in sex: the man, as Hera claimed; or, as Zeus claimed, the woman, as Tiresias had experienced both. Tiresias revealed woman's greatest secret: that she receives the greater pleasure: "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."[8] Hera instantly struck him blind for his impiety. Zeus could do nothing to stop her, but he did give Tiresias the gift of foresight[9] and a lifespan of seven lives.

Stripped of its narrative, anecdotal and causal connections, the mythic figure of Tiresias combines several archaic elements: the blind seer; the impious interruption of a natural rite (whether of a bathing goddess or coupling serpents); serpents and staff (Caduceus); a holy man's double gender (shaman); and competition between deities.

Tiresias's background, fully male and then fully female, was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. Also, prophecy was a gift given only to the priests and priestesses. Therefore, Tiresias offered Zeus and Hera evidence and gained the gift of male and female priestly prophecy. How he 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.

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. This is his emblematic role in tragedy (see below). Like most oracles, he is generally extremely reluctant to offer the whole of what he sees in his visions.

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.[10] 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.[11]

[edit] 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. Along with Cadmus, he dresses in women's clothing to go up the mountain to worship Dionysus with the Theban women.

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 first that he has no foresight and then that Tiresias had had a hand in the murder, he reveals that in fact it was Oedipus himself who had (unwittingly) committed the crime. Outraged, Oedipus throws him out of the palace, but then afterwards realizes the truth.

Oedipus had handed over the rule of Thebes to his sons Eteocles and Polynices[12] but Eteocles refused to share the throne with his brother. Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes recounts the story of the war which followed. In it, Eteocles and Polynices kill each other, and Megareus kills himself because of Tiresias' prophecy that a voluntary death from a Theban would save the city.

Tiresias also appears in Sophocles' Antigone. Creon, now king of Thebes, refuses to allow Polynices to be buried. His niece, Antigone, defies the order and is caught; Creon decrees that she is to be buried alive. The gods express their disapproval of Creon's decision through Tiresias. However, Antigone has already hanged herself rather than be buried alive. When Creon arrives at the tomb where she is to be interred, his son, Haemon who was betrothed to Antigone, attacks Creon and then kills himself. When Creon's wife, Eurydice, is informed of her son and Antigone's deaths, she too takes her own life.

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

[edit] Death

Tiresias died after drinking the water from the spring Tilphussa, where he was struck by an arrow of Apollo. After his death he was visited in the underworld by Odysseus, to whom he gave valuable advice concerning the rest of his voyage, specifically concerning the cattle of Helios, advice which Odysseus' men did not follow, to their peril.

[edit] QE-RA-SI-JA

At Knossos, in a Late Minoan IIIA context (fourteenth century BC), seven Linear B texts mention an entity, unattested elsewhere as yet, called qe-ra-si-ja and, once, qe-ra-si-jo. If this title had survived the fall of LMIII Crete, then it could have evolved into *Terasias in Doric Greek and, possibly, *Te[i]resias in Ionic.[13]

[edit] The caduceus

Main article: Caduceus

Connections with the paired serpents on the caduceus are often made (Brisson 1976:55-57).

[edit] Sources

Tiresias appears in the following literary classics:

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Of a line born of the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus (Bibliotheke, III.6.7); see also Hyginus, Fabula 75.
  2. ^ Luc Brisson, 1976. Le mythe de Tirésias: essai d'analyse structurale (Leiden: Brill).
  3. ^ a b Bibliotheke III.6.7.
  4. ^ This, readable as a doublet of the Actaeon mytheme, was the version preferred by the English poets Tennyson and even Swinburne.
  5. ^ Eustathius and John Tzetzes place this episode on Mount Cithaeron in Boeotia, near the territory of Thebes.
  6. ^ According to Bibliotheke III.6.7, and in Phlegon, Mirabilia 4.
  7. ^ The episode is briefly noted by Hyginus, Fabula 75; Ovid treats it at length in Metamorposes III.
  8. ^ Bibliotheke III.6.7.
  9. ^ The blind prophet with inner sight as recompense for blindness, is a familiar mytheme.
  10. ^ Eustathius, Commentary on Homer's Odyssey 10.494.
  11. ^ Fully explored in structuralist mode, with many analogies drawn from ambivalent sexualities considered to exist among animals in Antiquity, in Brisson 1976.
  12. ^ The actual line of succession after Oedipus is debatable, and is represented in different ways even within Sophocles' own works, but this is the version told in Seven Against Thebes
  13. ^ Lesson 26: Mycenaean and Late Cycladic Religion and Religious Architecture.

[edit] References

Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tiresias
  • Robert Graves, 1960 (revised edition). The Greek Myths
  • Luc Brisson, 1976. Le mythe de Tirésias: essai d'analyse structurale (Leiden: Brill) Structural analysis by a follower of Claude Lévi-Strauss and a repertory of literary references and works of art in an iconographical supplement.
  • N. Loraux, The Experiences of Tiresias. The Feminine and the Greek Man, Princeton (NJ), 1995
  • G. Ugolini, Untersuchungen zur Figur des Sehers Teiresias, Tübingen, 1995
  • E. Di Rocco, Io Tiresia: metamorfosi di un profeta, Roma, 2007
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiresias"
Personal tools