In addition, the 2003 Radio Tales drama " Homer's Odyssey: Voyage to the Underworld " retells the portion of Homer's epic featuring Circe, followed by the voyage to Hades to consult with Tiresias.

Tiresias appears to Odysseus during the nekyia of Odyssey xi, in this Watercolor painting | watercolor with tempera by the Anglo-Swiss Johann Heinrich Füssli, c. 1780-85

Tiresias makes a dramatic appearance in the Odyssey, book XI, in which Odysseus calls up the spirits of the dead ( the nekyia ).

Homer's Odyssey provides the poem's narrative background: in its eleventh book the prophet Tiresias foretells that Ulysses will return to Ithaca after a difficult voyage, then begin a new, mysterious voyage, and later die a peaceful, " unwarlike " death that comes vaguely " from the sea ".

* Tiresias from the Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, and other Greek myths

There is a distinct possibility that the author of the Odyssey knew at least some version of the Telegony story ( the Thesprotian episode and Telegonus ' unusual spear in the Telegony may have been based on Tiresias ' prophecy in Odyssey book 11 ; but it is also possible that the Odyssey poet used the Telegonus story as a basis for Teiresias ' prophecy ).

Odysseus returns to Ithaca and then travels to Thesprotia, presumably to make the sacrifices commanded by Tiresias in Odyssey 11.

During the ensuing fight, Telegonus kills Odysseus with his unusual spear, thereby partially fulfilling Tiresias ' prophecy in Odyssey 11 that death would come to Odysseus " out of the sea " ( i. e., the poison of the ray ).

An alternate view takes qe-ra-si-ja and qe-ra-si-jo as proof of androgyny, and applies this name by similar arguments to the legendary seer, Tiresias, but these views are not mutually exclusive of one another.

Tiresias, the old, blind Theban prophet, is the only one not to suffer.

The name " Pentheus ", as Dionysus and Tiresias both point out, means " Man of Sorrows " and derives from πένθος, pénthos, sorrow or grief, especially the grief caused by the death of a loved one.

Eighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson, fall into three groups: one, in two episodes, recounts Tiresias ' sex-change and his encounter with Zeus and Hera ; a second group recounts his blinding by Athena ; a third, all but lost, seems to have recounted the misadventures of Tiresias.

Tiresias replied " Of ten parts a man enjoys one only.

At the end, Janus contacts them from N-space and directs them to the planet Helios to meet Tiresias, the " sightless one who sees all things " ( a reference to the Greek Tiresias.

After Odysseus throws a goat into the River Styx, Tiresias tells Odysseus on how to get home with one of the obstacles being an isle where Scylla and Charybdis lives.

Tiresias is presented as a complexly liminal figure, with a foot in each of many oppositions, mediating between the gods and mankind, male and female, blind and seeing, present and future, and this world and the Underworld.

Since Tiresias is both the greatest seer of the Classical mythos, a figure cursed by the gods, and both man and woman, he has been very useful to authors.

Close observation of a wasp building a mud nest returns the canto to earth and to the figure of Tiresias, last encountered in Cantos I and XLVII.

An alternative and less commonly told story has it that Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked.

In a separate episode, Tiresias was drawn into an argument between Hera and her husband Zeus, on the theme of who has more pleasure in sex: the man, as Hera claimed ; or, as Zeus claimed, the woman, as Tiresias had experienced both.

" So sentient is Tiresias, even in death ," observes Marina Warner " that he comes up to Odysseus and recognizes him and calls him by name before he has drunk the black blood of the sacrifice ; even Odysseus ' own mother cannot accomplish this, but must drink deep before her ghost can see her son for himself.

However, after being provoked to anger by Oedipus ' accusation first that he has no foresight and then that Tiresias had had a hand in the murder, he reveals that in fact it was Oedipus himself who had ( unwittingly ) committed the crime.

* Frank Herbert also uses the mythic characteristics of Tiresias in his second Dune novel, Dune Messiah, where the protagonist Paul Atreides loses his sight but has prophetic powers to counter this stemming from insights into both the male and female part of the psyche.

Odysseus has been warned by both Circe and the shade of Tiresias to avoid Thrinacia, but his men beg him to let them stop and rest.

Ensembles he has worked with include Pendulum Ensemble ( Toronto ), Aventa Ensemble ( Victoria ), Continuum Contemporary Music ( Toronto ), Fluterra ( Toronto ), Tiresias ( Vancouver ), Ives Ensemble ( Amsterdam ), Ensemble contemporain de Montréal + ( Montreal ), nu: nord ( Montreal ), Canticum Ostrava ( Czech Republic ), University of Toronto Women's Choir, Link Ensemble New York, Link Ensemble Tokyo, Brooklyn Conservatory Guitar Ensemble, Brooklyn Conservatory Orchestra, and others.

The research basis of Tiresias Screenfont ’ s legibility claims have been called into question.

Tiresias was also said to have been given the ability to understand the language of the birds by Athena.

The word surrealist was first used by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe his 1917 play Les Mamelles de Tirésias ( The Breasts of Tiresias ), which was later adapted into an opera by Francis Poulenc.

After being conquered by the Cenomani, a Gallic tribe, the city was conquered between the first and second Punic wars by the Romans, who attributed its name to Manto, a daughter of Tiresias.

: In the early 1970s the satirical magazine Private Eye had a crossword set by the Labour MP Tom Driberg, under the pseudonym of " Tiresias " ( supposedly " a distinguished academic churchman ").

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, King Pentheus is warned by the blind seer Tiresias to welcome Bacchus or else " Your blood be poured out over your mother and sisters ..." Pentheus dismisses Tiresias and ignores his warnings.

When a legitimate argument is raised against his course of action by Tiresias, he is in fact completely open to changing course, even before he learns of the deaths of his family members.

An alternate story told by the poet Pherecydes was followed in Callimachus ' poem " The Bathing of Pallas "; in it, Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked.

Hera was not pleased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman.

Often when his name is attached to a mythic prophecy, it is introduced simply to supply a personality to the generic example of a seer, not by any inherent connection of Tiresias with the myth: thus it is Tiresias who tells Amphytrion of Zeus and Alcmena and warns the mother of Narcissus that the boy will thrive as long as he never knows himself.

A number of the late long poems, such as, for instance, the 1971 Tiresias, show the effects of reading these poets in their looser formal structures.

When Amphitryon finally returned to Thebes, Alcmene told him that he had come the night before and slept with her ; he learned from Tiresias what Zeus had done.

The witches were successful in preventing the birth until Historis, daughter of Tiresias, thought of a trick to deceive the witches.

Tiresias was a priest of Zeus, and as a young man he encountered two snakes mating and hit them with a stick.

As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto.

After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes, struck them with her staff, and became a man once more.

When Tiresias sided with Zeus, Hera struck him blind.

Astonished, Amphitryon sent for the seer Tiresias, who prophesied an unusual future for the boy, saying he would vanquish numerous monsters.

Odysseus then summoned the spirit of the old prophet Tiresias for advice on how to appease the gods upon his return home.

While Odysseus was away praying, his men ignored the warnings of Tiresias and Circe and hunted down the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios as their food had run short.

Antonin Artaud plays the part of Tiresias.

* 1658: The Psyche, or soul, of Tiresias is of the masculine gender — Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia.

He wishes to invoke and question the shade of Tiresias in particular ; however, he is unable to summon the seer's spirit without the assistance of others.

Tiresias, the blind prophet, enters.

Creon accuses Tiresias of being corrupt.

The old men Cadmus and Tiresias, though not under the same spell as the Theban women ( who include Cadmus ' daughters Ino, Autonoe and Agave, Pentheus ' mother ), have become enamored of the Bacchic rituals and are about to go out celebrating when Pentheus returns to the city and finds them dressed in festive garb.

Creon also suggested that they try to find the blind prophet, Tiresias.