In Greek mythology, Tiresias (Teiresias) was the blind prophet of Apollo at Thebes, famed for clairvoyance, for living through seven generations of the Cadmean house, and for a period spent as a woman. Son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo, he advised Cadmus, revealed Oedipus's guilt, warned Creon in Antigone, and after death retained his prophetic mind in the Underworld, where Odysseus consulted him.
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I.Family and character
Tiresias was the son of Everes and the nymph Chariclo. He served as the standing seer of Thebes across seven generations, beginning as adviser to Cadmus, the city's founder. His daughter Manto also possessed the gift of prophecy.
As a seer he received visions, read bird-song (augury), or interpreted smoke and entrails. Pliny the Elder credits him with inventing augury. His pronouncements in literature are typically short, cryptic, and never wrong; he often withholds the full meaning until pressed.
II.Sex-change
On Mount Cyllene (or, in some accounts, Mount Cithaeron), Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes and struck them with his stick; he was transformed into a woman. After seven years he found mating snakes again and either left them alone or, according to Hyginus and Phlegon, trampled them, and was restored to male form.
A rarer variant recounted by Eustathius and Tzetzes multiplies the changes — woman to man and back again under Apollo, Hera, Zeus, the Muses, and Aphrodite — but the seven-year snake episode is the version retained by the mythographic mainstream.
III.Blindness and gift of prophecy
Ancient sources disagree on why Tiresias was blinded. One tradition says the gods struck him for revealing their secrets to mortals. Pherecydes and Callimachus (Hymn 5, The Baths of Pallas) tell that the young Tiresias saw Athena bathing at the spring of Hippocrene on Mount Helicon; Athena quenched his sight. When Chariclo begged for the curse to be undone, Athena instead cleansed his ears so that he could understand birdsong, gave him a staff of cornel-wood, and — in Callimachus — promised prophecy, long life, and retention of his mental powers after death.
In another account, preserved by Hyginus and treated at length by Ovid, Zeus and Hera disputed whether men or women enjoy love more. Tiresias, having lived as both, judged that women enjoy nine parts in ten. Hera blinded him in anger; Zeus compensated him with foresight and a lifespan of seven ordinary lives.
IV.Role in Theban myth
Tiresias recurs through the legendary history of Thebes. In Euripides' Bacchae he and Cadmus join the mountain rites of Dionysus and are rebuked by Pentheus. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex he is summoned during the plague and, after refusing at first, names Oedipus himself as the murderer of Laius. In Antigone he warns Creon that leaving Polynices unburied and walling Antigone alive will cost Creon his own son; Creon yields too late.
During the war of the Seven against Thebes, Hyginus and Statius have him foretell that Thebes would be saved if a Spartos freely sacrificed himself to Ares; Creon's son Menoeceus threw himself from the walls. Ovid also makes him the prophet who warned Liriope that her son Narcissus would live long only if he never came to know himself.
V.Death and the Underworld
Tiresias died after drinking from the tainted spring Tilphussa; some accounts add that he was struck by an arrow of Apollo. Pausanias places his tomb near the Tilphusan Well by Thebes; Pliny situates a monument in Macedonia.
His shade went to the Asphodel Meadows. Persephone allowed him to keep his clairvoyance after death. In Odyssey Book XI Odysseus summons him with a black sheep; Tiresias recognizes Odysseus before drinking the blood — a privilege denied even to Odysseus's mother — and advises him how to return to Ithaca if his crew spare Helios's cattle on Thrinacia.