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Tiresias

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Also known as Teiresias

thumb|300px|right|alt=A person with flowing robes holding a staff strikes two intertwined snakes on the ground|Tiresias strikes two snakes with a stick, and is transformed into a woman by Hera. Engraving by Johann Ulrich Kraus c. 1690. Taken from Die Verwandlungen des Ovidii (The Metamorphoses of Ovid). thumb|300px|alt=A baroque painting showing a male and female figure together|Pietro della Vecchia, Tiresias Transformed into a Woman, 17th century. In Greek mythology, Tiresias (; ) was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven

~14 min read

Encyclopedic overview

13 sections
Contents
  • Mythology
  • Sex-change
  • Blindness and gift of prophecy
  • Other myths
  • Death
  • Analysis
  • In other cultures
  • In the arts
  • Notes
  • References
  • Sources
  • Further reading
  • External links

thumb|300px|right|alt=A person with flowing robes holding a staff strikes two intertwined snakes on the ground|Tiresias strikes two snakes with a stick, and is transformed into a woman by Hera. Engraving by Johann Ulrich Kraus c. 1690. Taken from Die Verwandlungen des Ovidii (The Metamorphoses of Ovid). thumb|300px|alt=A baroque painting showing a male and female figure together|Pietro della Vecchia, Tiresias Transformed into a Woman, 17th century. In Greek mythology, Tiresias (; ) was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. He was the son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo. Tiresias participated fully in seven generations in Thebes, beginning as advisor to Cadmus, the founder of Thebes.

==Mythology== Eighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson, 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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Tiresias” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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