The Creepy Old, Blind Prophet: Teiresias

So, really––just how old is Teiresias? He was old with old-man King Cadmus. He saw (but not really....) Pentheus torn and eaten. Long generations later, he tried to warn Oedipus to not delve too deep into his past, but no one listens to the blind man.

By the way, no one knows enough about Teiresias himself. A little googling and bang, yes, he has a history, but are there any myths about him, in myth form? Say, Hesiod? Or Sophocles? Aeschylus? Euripides? I'm sure they would not soil their tragic hands with such light matters as Teiresias' early life.

What has he to tell that a tragedian might want to elaborate upon? He's blind, but oh, that was taken by a comedian most likely. You see, in one version, Teiresias went walking in the woods one day and saw two snakes writhing in the grass, copulating as snakes do. I'm going to assume in his youth, Teiresias was a weirdo. He hit the snakes with a stick.

As punishment, the goddess of sex turned him into a woman. Yes, a woman.

For some reason––or perhaps he is just that weird, or a major xenophobe––Teiresias did not seem to leave Thebes. Some years later, he came upon the exact same snakes, doing the exact same thing, and this time he let them do it without any cudgeling.

Hera saw, and she rewarded. Ta-da, and now he was a man again.

However, Teiresias had a problem with staying out of trouble. Hera and Zeus were having a spat about who enjoyed intercourse the most. They could not agree, so they turned to the only person who could answer honestly, having been both male and female: Teiresias. They put him to it, and he said men had more. Hera, indignant (always), cursed him with blindness. Zeus (most likely) shrugged, and he gave Teiresias second-sight as compensation.

But, answer found––Teiresias knew the answer to their question.

Teiresias is a weirdo.

*****

Teiresias got to rest, it seems, from the glimpses we have in mythology. Unless he does nothing between Theban crises and god-spats, he must be pulling his hair out as the local city-seer.

Then, of course, Odysseus was still asking for his advice from beyond the grave. That was an interesting moment in Homer.

Odysseus pours some blood in a hole in the ground and uses a stick to swat all non-Teiresias ghosts away.

Teiresias comes, slurps up the blood. "Why, thank you, that was nice and tasty. I don't get to eat down here. Now how can I help you?"

"I need to get off an island with a beautiful but crazy lady. She turned my men into pigs once, but then we had sex for about a year; it was nice. Still, I sort of miss my wife."

Hello, Greek Lit.