Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes, spent seven years as a woman
In Greek myth, Tiresias struck a pair of mating snakes on Mount Cyllene and was instantly turned into a woman. Seven years later a second encounter with snakes changed him back. That double life made him the perfect judge when Zeus and Hera quarrelled, and the verdict cost him his sight but gave him prophecy.
Tiresias was the blind prophet of Apollo at Thebes, son of the shepherd Everes and the nymph Chariclo. Blessed with an extraordinary lifespan, he advised Thebans across seven generations, starting with the city's founder, Cadmus. The scholar Luc Brisson counts eighteen ancient allusions to him, falling into three groups: the change of sex and its sequel with Zeus and Hera, his blinding by Athena, and a third, almost entirely lost set of misadventures.
The snake story has variants. In one, Apollo told the transformed Tiresias that harming another pair of snakes would reverse the change; after seven years she found them and, depending on the teller, either spared or trampled them, and became a man again. The late commentator Eustathius told a wilder tale in which Tiresias began life female and switched sex repeatedly at the hands of Apollo, Hera, Zeus and the Muses, until Aphrodite finally turned him into a mouse.
Ancient writers also disagreed over the blindness. One tradition says the gods punished him for revealing their secrets to mortals. Pherecydes and Callimachus say the young Tiresias stumbled upon Athena bathing with his mother in the spring of Hippocrene on Mount Helicon, and even Chariclo's pleading could not undo the goddess's curse. The most famous version has Zeus and Hera arguing over whether men or women take more pleasure in love. Tiresias, having lived as both, sided with Zeus. Hera blinded him, and Zeus compensated with foresight and a life spanning seven ordinary lifetimes.
His methods of divination varied: visions, birdsong, and reading images in the smoke of burnt offerings. Pliny the Elder credited him with inventing augury, and he was said to summon the dead to answer questions. His daughter Manto inherited the gift. In Ovid's Metamorphoses the nymph Liriope becomes his first client, asking about her baby Narcissus. Tiresias warns that the boy will live long only if he never comes to know himself.
Source: Tiresias
