Tiresias

Tiresias was born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, the rugged mountain region of the Peloponnese, to Everes, a shepherd of Thebes, and Chariclo, a nymph of the springs. He was a mortal, but his mother was a spirit of the water, and from her he inherited a connection to the hidden things of the world. As a young man, he was walking on a mountain path when he came upon two serpents mating in the grass. He struck them with his staff, either from shock or from the simple impulse of a shepherd who sees snakes, and in that moment his life changed. The goddess Hera, the queen of Olympus and wife of Zeus, the king of the gods who ruled with his thunderbolt, transformed him into a woman. He lived as a woman for seven years, marrying and serving as a priestess of Hera, learning the secrets of the female world that no man could know. In the eighth year, he found another pair of serpents mating on the same spot and struck them again, and Hera restored him to his male form. He had lived as both, and that strange experience would shape everything that followed.

The most famous consequence of his double life came when Zeus and Hera quarrelled. The king and queen of the gods were arguing about which gender experienced greater pleasure in love, and they could not agree. Zeus claimed that women enjoyed it more, while Hera insisted that men did. They called upon Tiresias, the only being who had experienced both, and asked him to settle the dispute. Tiresias told the truth: of ten parts of pleasure, he said, a woman enjoys nine and a man only one. Hera was enraged by this answer, for it contradicted her pride, and she struck Tiresias blind in her fury. Zeus, who could not undo his wife's curse, gave Tiresias a different gift in compensation: the power to understand the speech of birds, the art of prophecy, and a lifespan seven times that of ordinary men. From that day forward, Tiresias was blind to the visible world but could see the invisible one, the future that lay hidden from all other mortals.

In another telling, it was Athena who blinded him. The goddess was bathing in a spring with Chariclo, Tiresias's mother, when the young man stumbled upon them by accident. Athena covered her eyes, but Chariclo begged the goddess not to punish her son. Athena could not restore his sight, for the laws of the gods are absolute, but she opened his ears to the voices of birds and gave him a staff that could guide his steps. Whether the blinding came from Hera or Athena, the result was the same: Tiresias became the most trusted prophet in Greece, the man whose words were never false and whose advice kings ignored at their peril.

He served the city of Thebes through its greatest tragedies. When Laius, the king of Thebes, was murdered at a crossroads, Tiresias knew the truth but could not speak it until the gods allowed. When Oedipus, the son of Laius who had been abandoned as an infant and raised in Corinth, returned to Thebes and solved the riddle of the Sphinx, the winged monster with the face of a woman and the body of a lion who strangled travellers who could not answer her riddle, he became king and married his own mother Jocasta without knowing it. A plague struck the city, and Oedipus demanded that Tiresias reveal the murderer of Laius. The seer tried to refuse, for the truth was too terrible to speak, but Oedipus accused him of conspiracy and forced the words from him. Tiresias told the king that the murderer he sought was himself, that he had killed his father and married his mother, and that the plague would not lift until the truth was known. Oedipus raged and disbelieved, but the prophecy was true, and when the truth came out, Oedipus blinded himself with the pins of his mother's brooches and wandered into exile.

Years later, when the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, quarrelled over the throne of Thebes, Tiresias advised them to share the kingship. They refused, and Polynices raised an army of seven champions from Argos to attack his own city. Tiresias told the Thebans that the city would fall unless the last surviving son of Oedipus led the defence. That son was Menoeceus, the son of Creon, the brother of Jocasta, and the young man sacrificed himself by leaping from the walls to fulfil the prophecy. The Thebans drove back the attackers, but the cost was terrible: Eteocles and Polynices killed each other in single combat before the gates.

Tiresias lived to a great age, his lifespan extended by the gift of Zeus. In his final years, he left Thebes and travelled to the spring Tilphussa, near the city of Haliartus in Boeotia. Some say he drank from the spring and died, for the water was sacred to Apollo and not meant for mortal lips. Others say he simply lay down beside the water and passed away, his long life finally spent. In the Underworld, the realm of the dead ruled by Hades, the gloomy god who sat on a throne of darkness, Tiresias retained his mind and his power. When Odysseus, the hero of the Trojan War whose ten-year voyage home became the subject of Homer's Odyssey, descended into the Underworld to seek advice, it was Tiresias who spoke to him. The seer told Odysseus that he must sail to the island of Thrinacia, where the cattle of Helios, the sun god who drove his chariot across the sky each day, grazed, and that he must not touch them. He warned him of the suitors who had taken over his palace in Ithaca, and he told him how to appease Poseidon, the god of the sea who shook the earth with his trident, whose anger had kept Odysseus from his home. Tiresias was the only shade in the Underworld who could speak to the living without drinking the blood of sacrifice, for Persephone, the queen of the dead, daughter of Demeter and wife of Hades, had granted him that honour.