Tiresias
Tiresias, in Greek mythology, a blind Theban seer, the son of one of Athena’s favourites, the nymph Chariclo. He is a participant in several well-known legends. Among the ancient authors who mention him are Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Ovid.
At Thebes, Tiresias played an active part in the tragic events involving Laius, the king of Thebes, and his son Oedipus. Later legend told that he lived for seven (or nine) generations, dying after the expedition of the Seven Against Thebes.
Besides longevity, another of Tiresias’s features involves his having lived as a man, then as a woman, and then as a man again. Reportedly, he had been turned into a woman as the result of having struck and wounded mating snakes. When Tiresias returned to the site of the transformation seven years later to see if the “spell” could be reversed, Tiresias did indeed see the same snakes coupling and was changed back into a man.
That experience of life as both sexes may have inadvertently caused his blindness. One story holds that Hera and Zeus disagreed about which of the sexes experienced more pleasure during sex, with Hera arguing that the answer was men, by far. When they consulted Tiresias, he asserted that women had greater pleasure than men, and Hera thereupon struck him blind. Zeus, in thanks for his support, gave him the gifts of prophecy and longevity. Another version has it that Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he saw her bathing. Chariclo begged her to help him, so Athena, instead of restoring his ability to see the physical world, gave him the ability to see the future.
Tiresias also had a role in Homer’s Odyssey. In that work, Tiresias retained his prophetic gifts even in the underworld, where the hero Odysseus was sent to consult him.
The figure of Tiresias recurs in later European literature, both as prophet and as man-woman, in such works as Guillaume Apollinaire’s Surrealist play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (first performed 1917; “The Breasts of Tiresias”) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).