Tiresias

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Tiresias is presented by Dante among the figures of classical antiquity placed in the fourth ditch of the eighth circle, reserved for soothsayers, who proceed with their faces turned backward. The note to verse 40 of Canto XX specifies that Tiresias was a Theban and the father of Manto, and that he also appears among the ranks of the Greeks in the war of the Seven against Thebes; it also recounts the episode, drawn from Ovid, in which he struck two coiled serpents with a rod and was transformed into a female, regaining the male sex only seven years later by striking the same serpents a second time. Tiresias is also named in Purgatorio XXII, where his daughter Manto is recalled among the figures of Statius' Thebaid. The treatment reserved for him by Dante is the same as that reserved for the other ancient and modern soothsayers: the penalty of contrapasso and the sarcastic tone unite mythical figures and astrologers of the present.