They decide to ask Tiresias, who reportedly has experienced life as both a man and woman. ![]() When Athena blinded Tiresias, she also gave him foresight, the ability to see into the future. He became blind when he accidentally saw the goddess Athena bathing, and she took his sight away for this. Tiresias was the son of a shepherd and a nymph. In fact, he was metaphorically blind to the truth of his birth for much of his life when Oedipus finally learned the truth, he physically blinded himself by poking out his eyes with the long gold pins from his dead wife’s brooches. He shows Odysseus how to get back to Ithaca and allows Odysseus to communicate with the other souls in Hades. Tiresias meets Odysseus when Odysseus journeys to the underworld in Book 11. ![]() A Theban prophet who inhabits the underworld. Yes, having intercourse or, if you will, ‘at it’. There are, in fact, several versions of the Tiresias story, but this is the most famous: one day, the young Tiresias saw two serpents mating. Tiresias was a seer, but how he came to acquire the gift of ‘second sight’ or prophecy is a curious one. Among the ancient authors who mention him are Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Ovid. He is a participant in several well-known legends. Tiresias, in Greek mythology, a blind Theban seer, the son of one of Athena’s favourites, the nymph Chariclo. ![]() What is the blind prophets name in the Odyssey? Puzzled at first, then angry, Oedipus insists that Tiresias tell Thebes what he knows. Oedipus begs him to reveal who Laius’s murderer is, but Tiresias answers only that he knows the truth but wishes he did not. Who is the blind prophet in Oedipus the King?Ī boy leads in the blind prophet Tiresias. 5 What is the name of the blind prophet in Sophocles?.4 What does Oedipus blindness symbolize?.1 Who is the blind prophet in Oedipus the King?.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. 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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