The Seba library treats Tiresias in 9 passages, across 8 authors (including Campbell, Joseph, Liz Greene, Vernant, Jean-Pierre).
those who, like Tiresias, have seen and come into touch with the mystery of the two serpents and, in some sense at least, have been themselves both male and female, know the reality from both sides
Campbell argues that Tiresias’s bisexual transformation confers unique metaphysical knowledge, explaining why he alone among the dead retains full understanding in Hades.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964thesis
Teiresias has evidently spied upon a deep mystery, for these snakes are the World Serpent, male and female together. Thus they attack him, for he has no business seeing what he has seen.
Greene interprets Tiresias’s vision of the coupling serpents as an unauthorized apprehension of the uroboric unity of opposites, for which nature exacts the price of blindness and grants the compensation of prophecy.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
Teiresias, on the other hand, is a rather different kind of character. When we meet him in the tale of Oidipus, he is a blind seer, renowned for his insight and judgement. It is he who warns Oidipus that the accursed thing which has polluted Thebes is the king himself.
Greene introduces Tiresias as the paradigmatic Libran figure whose inner vision — purchased through outer blindness — enables him to name the truth that power refuses to hear.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984thesis
amid their inconsistent shades, he is the only one to retain his phrenes and noos, the sense and knowledge that belong to the
Vernant argues that Tiresias, made a living kolossos by Athena’s blinding, paradoxically becomes among the dead the sole possessor of intact mind and knowledge, reversing the usual economy of sight and understanding.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
Both Haemon and Tiresias, then, press a connection between learning and yielding, between practical wisdom and supple flexibility.
Nussbaum reads Tiresias as Sophocles’ spokesman for a conception of practical wisdom defined by flexibility and receptivity rather than Creon’s rigid self-sufficiency.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
I promised for Tiresias as well a pure black sheep, the best in all my flock. So with these vows, I called upon the dead.
Homer’s Odyssey establishes the ritual context in which Tiresias is accorded unique honor among the dead, requiring a dedicated sacrificial offering before his shade will speak.
, The Odyssey, 2017supporting
It has been suggested that this old man was Teiresias, which fits in with Lehmann’s theory that part of the Cabeiri cult was a journey through the underworld. As Teiresias was Odysseus’s teacher
Hillman situates Tiresias within the senex-puer dyad and the mystery-cult context, identifying him as a possible underworld-guide figure whose role as teacher to Odysseus parallels Aristotle’s relation to Alexander.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
Tiresias, 54-55, 64, 84.
Detienne’s index places Tiresias explicitly within the tradition of archaic Greek masters of truth, associating him with the pages treating alētheia and prophetic speech.
, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996aside
it would be suggested that Teiresias was not a skia, or ‘shadow.’
Bremmer notes the scholarly debate over whether Tiresias counts as a skia among the dead, implying his anomalous ontological status in the underworld.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983aside