#Name of the blind prophet in oedipus full#

The messages they impart are therefore timeless and universal, and this helps to explain why, more than two millennia after they were first written down, they remain such an important influence on Western culture.

And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).Īnd this points up an important fact about the Greek myths, which is that, like Aesop’s fables which date from a similar time and also have their roots in classical Greek culture, many of these stories evolved as moral fables or tales designed to warn Greek citizens of the dangers of hubris, greed, lust, or some other sin or characteristic. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. Random House Kernerman Websters College Dictionary, 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd.

(Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) (in Greek myth) a blind prophet of Thebes. He was the son of the shepherd Everes el and the nymph Chariclo. The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. From WikiIn Greek mythology, Tiresias ( /tarisis/ Greek:, Teiresias) was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch.

So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. Indeed, Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land state that what Tiresias ‘ sees’ (or foresees) forms the substance of the whole poem, raising the intriguing possibility that the ‘Unreal City’ Eliot depicts in that poem is a prophecy of the future as much as it a vision of contemporary (for 1922, anyway) London.

#Name of the blind prophet in oedipus full#