Hera said that it was the male, while Zeus said it was the female. The second version says that Zeus and Hera were having a discussion about whether males or females experienced more pleasure during sex. There is an alternative story regarding the events that cause the prophet’s blindness. This would point his life in a new direction. To make amends for what she had done to Tiresias, she gave him the gift of prophecy. ![]() But when she tried to restore his sight, she was unable to do so. Tiresias’ mother begged the goddess to undo the curse, and after enough persuasion, Athena agreed. He found himself unable to turn away from her nakedness and was blinded by her as punishment. This came to be when he stumbled upon the goddess Athene while she was bathing in a lake. This reversed the curse, and Tiresias was turned into a man once again. Remembering the action that had caused her current fate, she left the snakes alone. This duty lasted for seven years and she even married and had children.Īfter seven years had passed, she came across another pair of snakes. While Tiresias was a woman, she served as a priestess for Hera. Hera punished him for his actions and turned him into a woman. For some reason, he struck the snakes and killed either both or one, depending on the version of the myth. When Tiresias was a young man, he came across two snakes that were mating on Mount Cyllene. Both have to do with alterations to his physical being that would shape his prophetic future. ![]() There are two main myths that are commonly associated with Tiresias. He is also mentioned by several other authors, including Pindar, Sophocles, Ovid and Euripides. It is in this written work that his prophetic gifts are preserved in the Underworld and he is consulted by Odysseus. The messages they impart are therefore timeless and universal, and this helps to explain why, more than two millennia after they were first written down, they remain such an important influence on Western culture.Tiresias is mentioned in several mythological works, including Homer’s Odyssey. And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).Īnd this points up an important fact about the Greek myths, which is that, like Aesop’s fables which date from a similar time and also have their roots in classical Greek culture, many of these stories evolved as moral fables or tales designed to warn Greek citizens of the dangers of hubris, greed, lust, or some other sin or characteristic. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. ![]() ![]() Indeed, Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land state that what Tiresias ‘ sees’ (or foresees) forms the substance of the whole poem, raising the intriguing possibility that the ‘Unreal City’ Eliot depicts in that poem is a prophecy of the future as much as it a vision of contemporary (for 1922, anyway) London.
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