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Tiresias was a priest of Zeus, and as a young man he encountered two snakes mating and hit them with a stick. He was then transformed into a woman. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a prostitute of great renown. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes, struck them with her staff, and became a man once more. As a result of his experiences, Zeus and Hera asked him to settle the question of which sex, male or female, experienced more pleasure during intercourse. Zeus claimed it was women; Hera claimed it was men. Tiresias sided with Zeus, saying that on a scale of one to ten, women enjoy sex nine times to men's one. Hera struck him blind. Since Zeus could not undo what she had done, he gave him the gift of prophecy. An alternative story in Callimachus' poem "The Bathing of Pallas" has it that Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked. His mother, Chariclo, begged her to undo her curse, but Athena couldn't; she took the serpent from her aegis and commanded it to lick his ears, giving him prophecy instead.

Stripped of its narrative and anecdotal and causal connections, the mythic figure of Tireisias combines several archaic elements: the blind seer; the impious interruption of a natural rite (whether of a bathing goddess or coupling serpents); serpents and staff (Caduceus); a holy man's double gender (shaman); and competition between deities.

Tiresias's background was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. Greek mythology contained many hermaphroditic figures (including Hermaphroditus), but Tiresias was fully male and then fully female. Also, prophecy was a gift given only to the priests and priestesses. Therefore, Tiresias offered Zeus and Hera evidence and gained the gift of male and female priestly prophecy.

As a seer, Tiresias was "a common title for soothsayers throughout Greek legendary history" (Graves 1960, 105.5). In Greek literature, Tiresias's pronouncements are always gnomic but never wrong. He is generally extremely reluctant to offer his visions like most oracles. Often when his name is attached to a mythic prophecy, it is introduced simply to supply a personality to the generic example of a seer, not by any inherent connection of Tiresias with the myth: thus it is Tiresias who warns the mother of Narcissus that the boy will thrive as long as he never knows himself. This is his emblemmatic role in tragedy (see below).