Teiresias, the seer of Oedipus the King - Leeds International ...

HANNA M. ROISMAN, TEIRESIAS, THE SEER OF OEDIPUS THE KING
plot facilitator and Oedipus’s sparring partner, he could not have fulfilled the
seer’s role in focusing so well the doubts about knowledge that the play raises.
2. Seneca’s Teiresias
Seneca adopted various aspects of Sophocles’ plot, which I will not go into
here; but he was quite independent in his characterization. 22 His Oedipus, to take
the chief example, is a more introspective character than Sophocles’ hero and
expresses premonitions and a sense of guilt that his Sophoclean namesake did not.
His Oedipus also places greater emphasis than the Sophoclean hero on his courage
in having killed the Sphinx, and less on his capacity to know, though he mentions
that too.
The same independence applies to Seneca’s treatment of Teiresias. Seneca
inherited Teiresias as a character in the Oedipus saga from Sophocles, but very
much reduced his role and his presence. He places Teiresias on stage for only 46
lines, in contrast to the 76 lines of Sophocles’ Teiresias. He also shifts key
functions that Sophocles had given to Teiresias to Creon, making Creon the one
who argues with Oedipus to create dramatic tension and who informs Oedipus
that he was Laius’ murderer. Moreover, Seneca makes his Teiresias not only a less
contentious presence than Sophocles’ seer, but much less a presence altogether.
Seneca’s Teiresias is an ancillary figure who interacts minimally with the
other characters in the play. There is no real give and take between him and
Oedipus, or between him and any other character in the play. In the divination
rites over which he presides, he takes second place to his daughter Manto, who is
the one to perform them. He ushers in the choral paean to Bacchus, but does not
participate in it. He figures in Creon’s account of their visit to the Otherworld; but
the visit is not dramatized, so the audience does not see him summoning Laius’
ghost or conversing with him.
But this apparent reduction in role in no way means that Seneca stuck
Teiresias in his play because he had to. He did not. He could have left him out,
just as he had omitted the Athenian King Aigeus, who had appeared in Euripides’
Medea, in his own rendition of the myth. It is also possible that he removed
Teiresias and Menoeceus, who figured in Euripides’ Phoenician Women, from his
version, though one cannot be sure here because only 600 lines of the play have
come down to us.
Seneca clearly chose to include Teiresias in his Oedipus. But why? I set about
trying to answer this question by looking at his persona in much the same way as I
had at the persona of Sophocles’ Teiresias, starting with his characterization and
going on to his function. It soon became apparent, though, that the concept of
characterization is problematic here. Seneca does not really give his Teiresias a
‘character’ or ‘personality’—that is, a set of traits or behaviors with an organic
consistency and continuity. Rather, he presents his Teiresias in three distinct
depictions, which are not connected to one another in the way that various facets
22 For the recent tendency to analyze Seneca’s tragedies independently of their Greek precursors,
and the problem of the identity of Seneca the tragedian, see most recently Kohn (2003).
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