
He even gave him advice where he should not eat the cattle of Helios on Thrinacia (advice which Odysseus' men did not follow, which led to them getting killed by Zeus' thunderbolts during a storm).

NAME OF THE BLIND PROPHET IN THE ODYSSEY HOW TO
Even Odysseus' own mother cannot accomplish this, but must drink deep before her ghost can see her son for himself." Tiresias tells Odysseus how to get past Scylla and Charybdis. "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. Tiresias makes a dramatic appearance in the Odyssey, book XI, in which Odysseus calls up the spirits of the dead (the nekyia). Zeus could do nothing to stop her or reverse her curse, but in recompense he did give Tiresias the gift of foresight and a lifespan of seven lives. As Tiresias had experienced both, Tiresias replied, "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only." Hera instantly struck him blind for his impiety. 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. Instead, she cleaned his ears, giving him the ability to understand birdsong, thus the gift of augury. His mother, Chariclo, a nymph of Athena, begged Athena to undo her curse, but the goddess could not. In it, Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked. An alternative story told by Pherecydes was followed in Callimachus' poem "The Bathing of Pallas". Tiresias became a common title for soothsayers throughout Greek legendary history.Īccording to the mythographic compendium Bibliotheke, different stories were told of the cause of Tiresias' blindness, the most direct being that he was simply blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets. In his text De Divinatione, Cicero admits several other nations besides the Romans paid attention to the patterns of flying birds as signs from the gods as well. Pliny the Elder credits Tiresias with the invention of augury. Like other oracles, how Tiresias obtained his information varied: sometimes, he would receive visions, other times he would listen for the songs of birds, or ask for a description of visions and pictures appearing within the smoke of burnt offerings or entrails, and so interpret them.

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.
