Tiresias

Classical traditions preserve multiple variant accounts of Tiresias’s transformations and the origins of his prophetic gifts. In one widely cited variant he encounters a pair of mating snakes on Mount Cyllene and is transformed into a woman for seven years before returning to manhood; this episode is commonly used to explain his later testimony about sexual experience. Two principal traditions explain his blindness and compensation: one tradition (attested in later summaries of the mythic corpus) places his blinding at a spring where Athena bathed and, in that version, Athena thereafter 'cleansed his ears', granted augury and (in some tellings) a staff of cornel-wood that let him walk; another tradition makes his blindness a consequence of the Hera–Zeus dispute about which sex experiences greater pleasure, in which Tiresias’s judgment leads Hera to strike him blind while Zeus recompenses him with prophetic sight and a prolonged lifespan ('seven ordinary lives'). Sources report these differing sequences and agents rather than a single harmonized origin.

Accounts consistently portray Tiresias as an aged, blind man who walks with a staff; blindness is a defining bodily trait in the tradition. In the Athena-linked variant he is described as carrying a cornel-wood staff and walking 'like those who see' despite his blindness. His aged, blind appearance is the visual hallmark of his prophetic persona in tragedies and epic summaries.

Tiresias is credited with the gifts of prophecy and divination granted by the gods. Traditions attribute to him practices of augury (interpreting birdsong—explicitly associated with Athena 'cleansing his ears' in one version), visions, and interpretation of sacrificial smoke or entrails; Pliny is cited in the tradition as crediting him with the invention of augury. He is famed for exceptional longevity—described as living through 'seven generations in Thebes' or granted 'seven ordinary lives'—and for retaining prophetic authority after death (notably appearing in the Odyssey Book XI nekyia where he prophesies to Odysseus). Some summaries attribute to him the capacity, in tradition, to question or elicit answers from shades in the underworld; sources present this as an attributed aspect of his role in necromantic contexts rather than as a uniform folkloric rite.