Teiresias

You must go to the house of Hades and of dread Persephone to consult the ghost [ psukhê] of the blind Theban seer [ mantis] Teiresias whose mind [ phrenes] is still in place within him.

"When I had got the men together I said to them, ‘You think you are about to start home again, but Circe has explained to me that instead of this, we have got to go to the house of Hades and Persephone to consult the ghost of the Theban seer Teiresias.

More particularly you must promise that Teiresias shall have a black sheep all to himself, the finest in all your flocks.

But what I forgot to say about Oedipus, that he did not go to Delphi to consult the oracle, but, having met with Teiresias, reaped great evils from that man's divination through his own ignorance.

I reasoned, then, that Odysseus, after so many wanderings, did not shrink from wandering again, carrying an oar, on the counsel of Teiresias, a dead man, until he should meet with men who did not even know the sea by report;

Take heart, Teiresias, for you have reached your harbor and are near your friends;

ask Teiresias, the seer, if he has anything to say of heaven’s will.

Teiresias:

hasten, Teiresias, believe;

Dionysus will not compel women to be modest in regard to Aphrodite, but in nature you must look for that.

Having broken a part of the air which surrounds the earth, he gave this to Hera as a pledge protecting the real Dionysus from her hostility.

For you are mad in a most grievous way, and you will not be cured by drugs, nor are you sick without them.

But even the exceedingly clever, old Teiresias, falls with a shameful fall, when they couch shameful thoughts in fine phrasing for profit’s sake.

And for all the time that I have had this hair on my head, now white, once dark, I know that he has never been a false prophet to our city.

For the altars of our city and our hearths have one and all been tainted by the birds and dogs with the carrion taken from the sadly fallen son of Oedipus.

Teiresias, whose soul grasps all things, both that which may be told and that which is unspeakable, the Olympian secrets and the affairs of the earth, you feel, though you cannot see, what a huge plague haunts our state.

But here they bring at last the godlike prophet, the only man in whom truth lives.

To our way of thinking, these words, both his and yours, Oedipus, have been said in anger.

it was sitting, however, and the soothsayer who was conducting him said that while the omen was one suited to the great rather than to an ordinary person, and while it betokened glory, it nevertheless portended suffering, for the reason that other birds are most apt to attack the eagle when it is sitting;