Tiresias - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Tiresias' impressive apparition in Odyssey xi kept his image a lively one, and the figure of Tiresias has been much-invoked by fiction writers and poets. 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. At the climax of Lucian's Necyomantia, Tiresias in Hades is asked "what is the best way of life?" and his disconcertingly modern response, couched in high-flown diction, is "the life of the ordinary guy: forget philosophers and their metaphysics." This advice is pragmatic and moderate and represents the moral message of the short story. He also appears in Horace's Satire 2.5, in which he advises Odysseus to take up legacy hunting.
• In Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto XX), Dante sees Tiresias in the fourth pit of the eighth circle of Hell (the circle is for perpetrators of fraud and the fourth pit being the location for astrologers, sorcerers, soothsayers, diviners, and false prophets who claim to see the future when they couldn't) He was condemned to walk for eternity with his head twisted toward his back; while in life he strove to look forward to the future, in Hell he must only look backward. Tiresias' daughter Manto is also assigned her punishment here.
• More recently, "Tiresias" was the title of a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
• T. S. Eliot used Tiresias as an integral voice in his modernist poem, "The Waste Land".
• The French composer Francis Poulenc also wrote an opera called Les Mamelles de Tirésias ("The Breasts of Tiresias") based on Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealist text of 1917.
• 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.
• Amy Seham, drama professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, wrote a musical entitled "Tiresias" in 1999, with music by Chanda Walker and Kira Theimer.
• Tiresias as a motif of doubleness (male/female) also occurs in the writing of Rohinton Mistry. There it serves as a comparison to the protagonist of the short story "Lend me your Light", who is torn between his childhood home in Bombay and his new existence in Toronto: "I, Tiresias,/ Blind and throbbing between two lives..." (Tales from Firozsha Baag: 180).
• In Lawrence Durrell's novel Balthazar, the second part of his Alexandria Quartet, Melissa, Scobie and Balthazar are each seen as having moments of prophetic sight. Scobie also cross-dresses, thus implying the androgyny of Tiresias. The novel also features the sing-song rhyme:

Old Tiresias

No-one half so breezy as,

Half so free and easy as

Old Tiresias

• Tiresias also shows up in Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. Cal, the protagonist, compares himself to the seer, and has even played him in a production of Antigone.
• The blind beggar of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary echoes Tiresias. Emma looking in her mirror, contemplating her death and hearing the song of the blind beggar, reflects her vacillatiing struggle between the masculine and feminine identity.
• Dennis DeYoung uses Tiresias in the song "Castle Walls" on the 1977 Styx album The Grand Illusion.
• Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem entitled 'from Mrs Tiresias' in her collection The World's Wife. This poem is told from the point of view of Tiresias' marriage partner, and interprets the myth in a modern context.
• During the opening scenes of O Brother Where Art Thou, a derivative of Odyssey, Tiresias is introduced as an old black man on a railroad handcar. Although, when asked his name, he states "I have no name."
• Tiresias was featured in the Hercules episode "Hercules and the Griffin" voiced by Jack Carter. He was seen as a resident of a Greek Retirement Home.
• A 1999 episode of the Comedy Central series Strangers with Candy titled "Behind Blank Eyes", blind high school student Alan's surname is "Tiresias".
• In 2001 Le Tendre and Rossi published a two-volume comic book Tiresias, focusing on his gender-change.
• In Su Walton's 1969 Here Before Kilroy, Tiresias is the name of a homeless man who crops up throughout the story to make observations about the actions of the characters.
• In 1995, Jack Warden played the character in the Woody Allen film Mighty Aphrodite as a crusty blind beggar.
• The 2003 film Tiresia is inspired by this myth.
• The lyrics (reportedly by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford) of the Genesis song "The Cinema Show", from their 1973 album Selling England by the Pound, refer to "father Tiresias" and his experience of living as both a man and a woman.

Take a little trip back with father Tiresias,

Listen to the old one speak of all he has lived through.

"I have crossed between the poles, for me there's no mystery.

Once a man, like the sea, I raged.

Once a woman, like the earth, I gave.

But there is in fact more earth than sea."

• In 2007, Salley Vickers imagined a series of conversations between Tiresias and Sigmund Freud as part of the Canongate "Myths" series of novels. The myth in question was that of Oedipus. Book title : Where three roads meet.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier by Alan Moore includes an autobiography of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. This reveals that Tiresias had two daughters. While Manto inherited their father's prophetic abilities, the other daughter, Orlando (or Bio, as she was then named), found she changed gender as she grew, again inherited from her father. Tiresias is mentioned as having been ashamed at Orlando's gender-changing ability, sold him to pirate slavers and died escorting Manto to become the Oracle at Delphi.
• The Radio Tales drama "Homer's Odyssey: Voyage to the Underworld" is a dramatic retelling of the portion of Homer's epic poem that features the voyage to Hades to consult with the prophet Teiresias. The drama first aired via XM Satellite Radio on April 19, 2003.
• Jack Peñate, in his 2009 single " Be the One" sings "I walked away because of you, just like Tiresias I knew, that me and you were fated too"
• In the BBC television series Spooks, the character Connie Jones is revealed as an agent of the Russians, turned by them during Operation Renaissance. She protests that she wanted only to maintain the balance between the world powers, USSR/Russia and US/England. A cryptic warning reveals that Tiresias is coming; just before exploding a nuclear device, Connie reveals, she "was already here."