This ancient story is recorded in lost lines of Hesiod. As a result, Tiresias was released from his sentence and permitted to regain his masculinity. After seven years as a woman, Tiresias again found mating snakes depending on the myth, either she made sure to leave the snakes alone this time, or, according to Hyginus, trampled on them. According to some versions of the tale, Lady Tiresias was a prostitute of great renown. As a woman, Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, married and had children, including Manto, who also possessed the gift of prophecy. Hera was not pleased, and she punished Tiresias by transforming him into a woman. On Mount Cyllene in the Peloponnese, as Tiresias came upon a pair of copulating snakes, he hit the pair a smart blow with his stick. His mother, Chariclo, a nymph of Athena, begged Athena to undo her curse, but the goddess could not instead, she cleaned his ears, giving him the ability to understand birdsong, thus the gift of augury. An alternate story told by the poet Pherecydes was followed in Callimachus' poem 'The Bathing of Pallas' in it, Tiresias was blinded by Athena after he stumbled onto her bathing naked. According to the mythographic compendium Bibliotheke, different stories were told of the cause of his blindness, the most direct being that he was simply blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets. Eighteen allusions to mythic Tiresias, noted by Luc Brisson, fall into three groups: one, in two episodes, recounts Tiresias' sex-change and his encounter with Zeus and Hera a second group recounts his blinding by Athena a third, all but lost, seems to have recounted the misadventures of Tiresias.

Odysseus and the blind prophet