Tiresias

Circe tells Odysseus that he must go to the underworld and consult Tiresias before he can return. In Book XI Odysseus pours the blood of sacrificed animals into a trench, and the shades gather. Tiresias is the one he has come to see, and the prophet tells him that Poseidon is angry because of the blinded Cyclops, that he will reach home, but that he must not harm the cattle of Helios.

He also describes the suitors’ presence in Odysseus’s house and the need for punishment. The prophecy is both practical and moral: it tells Odysseus what to do and what not to do.

Tiresias adds that Odysseus must one day travel inland with an oar until he reaches a people who do not know the sea, and there plant the oar and sacrifice to Poseidon. Only then will his labours end and his death come from the sea in old age.

The prophecy extends the story beyond the Odyssey’s ending. It makes the return not a final arrival but a process with further obligations, and it gives the poem’s hero a future that the poem itself does not narrate.