Tiresias
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In
Mythology
Eighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson,[2] fall into three groups: the first recounts Tiresias' sex-change episode and later his encounter with Zeus and Hera; the second group recounts his blinding by Athena; the third, all but lost, seems to have recounted the misadventures of Tiresias.
Blindness and gift of prophecy
Like other
On
In
According to the mythographic compendium
He is said to have understood the language of birds and could divine the future from indications in a fire, or smoke. However, it was the communications of the dead he relied on the most, menacing them when they were late to attend him.[15]
Tiresias makes a dramatic appearance in the Odyssey, book XI, in which Odysseus calls up the spirits of the dead (the nekyia). As Persephone allows Tiresias to retain his powers of clairvoyance after death, he is able to see Odysseus without drinking the blood usually required for souls in the underworld to become conscious again. "So sentient is Tiresias, even in death," observes Marina Warner, "that he comes up to Odysseus and recognizes him and calls him by name before he has drunk the black blood of the sacrifice; even Odysseus' own mother cannot accomplish this, but must drink deep before her ghost can see her son for himself."[16]
As a seer, "Tiresias" was "a common title for soothsayers throughout Greek legendary history" (Graves 1960, 105.5). In
Tiresias and Thebes
Tiresias appears as the name of a recurring character in several stories and
In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, 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 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.
Tiresias also appears in Sophocles'
Tiresias and his prophecy are also involved in the story of the Epigoni.
Death
Tiresias died after drinking water from the tainted spring Tilphussa, where he was impaled by an arrow of Apollo.[17][18]
His shade descended to the
Caduceus
Connections with the paired serpents on the caduceus are often made (Brisson 1976:55–57).
In the arts
- The figure of Tiresias has been much invoked by fiction writers and poets. At the climax of
- Tiresias appears in Dante's Inferno, in Canto XX, among the soothsayers in the Fourth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle, where augurs are punished by having their heads turned backwards; since they claimed to see the future in life, in the afterlife they are denied any forward vision.
- The Breasts of Tiresias (French: Les mamelles de Tirésias) is a surrealist play by Guillaume Apollinaire written in 1903. The play received its first production in a revised version in 1917.[20] In his preface to the play, the poet invented the word "surrealism" to describe his new style of drama.[21] The French composer Francis Poulenc wrote an opera with the same name based on Apollinaire's 1917 play. It was first performed at the Opéra-Comique in 1947.[22]
- "Tiresias" the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, narrated by the persona Tiresias himself, incorporates the notion that his prophecies, though always true, are generally not believed.[23]
- Tiresias is featured in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (Section III, The Fire Sermon) and in a note Eliot states that Tiresias is "the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest."[24]
- Tiresias appears in Three Cantos III (1917) and cantos I and 47 in the long poem The Cantos by Ezra Pound.[25][26]
- Virginia Woolf's Orlando is a modernist novel that uses major events in Tiresias' life.[27][28][29]
- Tiresias is a ballet choreographed by Frederick Ashton to music by Constant Lambert first performed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London, on 9 July 1951.[30]
- "The Cinema Show", a song by the British progressive rock band Genesis from the 1973 album Selling England by the Poundrefers to Tiresias's sex change experience: "I have crossed between the poles, for me there's no mystery. Once a man, like the sea I raged, once a woman, like the earth I gave".
- "Castle Walls", a song by American progressive rock band Styx on their 1977 album The Grand Illusion, makes reference to Tiresias in the refrain "Far beyond these castle walls; Where I thought I heard Tiresias say; Life is never what it seems; And every man must meet his destiny".
- Tiresia, a 2003 French film directed by Bertrand Bonello uses the legend of Tiresias to tell the story of a modern transgender person.[31]
- Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife includes the poem "from Mrs Tiresias" which narrates the experience of Tiresias's wife after his transformation.[32]
- Inspired by Tiresias, Takeba Kumiko wrote the manga Tiresias Cage, which was published in 2022 and completed in two volumes. The work follows the protagonist Chihaya Katsuragi, who finds himself transforming into a woman's body.[33]
Notes
- Fabula75.
- ^ Luc Brisson, 1976. Le mythe de Tirésias: essai d'analyse structurale (Leiden: Brill).
- ^ Gaius Plinius Secundus, Naturalis Historia 7.12.3
- Mount Cithaeronin Boeotia, near the territory of Thebes.
- ^ Hygini Fabulae, LXXV
- ^ According to Bibliotheke III.6.7, and in Phlegon, Mirabilia 4.
- ^ Eustathius, Commentary on Homer's Odyssey 10.494.
- ^ Fully explored in structuralist mode, with many analogies drawn from ambivalent sexualities considered to exist among animals in Antiquity, in Brisson 1976.
- ISBN 9781138941205.
- ^ a b Bibliotheke III.6.7.
- ^ This, readable as a doublet of the Actaeon mytheme, was the version preferred by the English poets Tennyson and even Swinburne.
- MetamorphosesIII.
- ^ Bibliotheke III.6.7.
- ^ The blind prophet with inner sight as recompense for blindness is a familiar mytheme.
- ^ William Godwin (1876). "Lives of the Necromancers". pp. 46–47.
- ^ Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: the allegory of the female form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. p. 329
- ISBN 978-0-19-938113-5, retrieved 2023-12-29
- ISSN 0397-7870.
- S2CID 163139952.
- ^ Brockett and Hildy (2003, 439).
- ^ Banham (1998, 1043).
- ^ Albert Bermel, "Apollinaire's Male Heroine" Twentieth Century Literature 20.3 (July 1974), pp. 172–182 .
- ISBN 9781435630468.
- ISBN 978-0-7910-9307-8.
- ISBN 978-0-19-921557-7.
- ISBN 978-0-520-03687-1.
- ^ "Orlando – Modernism Lab". yale.edu. Archived from the original on 22 June 2019. Retrieved 31 January 2019.
- ^ Androgyny in Modern Literature, Tracey Hargreaves, 2005, p. 91.
- ^ Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries, David Carrier, 2006, p. 4.
- ^ Alexander Bland, The Royal Ballet: The First Fifty Years. London: Threshold Books, 1981, p286.
- ^ Dawson, Tom. "BBC - Movies - review - Tiresia". BBC. Retrieved 14 October 2017.
- ^ "The World's Wife: From Mrs Tiresias - Carol Ann Duffy @ SWF 2013". YouTube. 9 November 2013. Retrieved 24 January 2023.
- ^ MangaDex. "Tiresias Cage".
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References
- 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.
- Nicole Loraux, The experiences of Tiresias: the feminine and the Greek man, Princeton, 1995
- Gherardo Ugolini, Untersuchungen zur Figur des Sehers Teiresias, Tübingen, 1995
- E. Di Rocco, Io Tiresia: metamorfosi di un profeta, Roma, 2007
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
External links
Media related to Tiresias at Wikimedia Commons
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