A Note on the Snakes of Thebes
by Pip McGough
Content Warning: Sexual Content
Euenos of Corinth came to Thebes because of a sentence.
He had found it in a damaged copy of Pherecydes, between an account of the daughters of Minyas and a catalogue of rivers. The sentence concerned the blind prophet Tiresias and was perhaps an interpolation. It said:
He remembered both pleasures.
Nothing more.
Euenos copied the words onto a scrap of papyrus. For several months he carried it with him. In Thebes he was directed to a chamber below the ruined temple of Hedone beyond the Electran Gate. It was circular and faced with bronze. Whether the chamber belonged to the temple or had preceded it was disputed. One priest told him that the bronze had been brought from Sidon. Another said the bronze was already there before men knew what it was.
Tiresias was waiting for him.
Euenos had expected blindness to make the old prophet’s face vacant. Instead it seemed crowded.
“You are here about the snakes,” Tiresias said.
“I found a sentence in Pherecydes,” said Euenos.
“Read it aloud.”
Euenos cleared his throat.
“He remembered both pleasures.”
Tiresias smiled.
“Is it false?” asked Euenos.
“No,” said Tiresias and stopped smiling.
The bronze walls gave back two men. In one place, where the metal darkened, Euenos thought he saw a third figure standing between them. When he moved his head, the figure vanished.
Tiresias touched the wall.
“I was young when I found the snakes. I remember that because I thought striking them mattered.”
“Did it?”
“Everything matters, once. Then it becomes a story.”
He told Euenos what was already known: the mountain, the coupling snakes, the blow of the staff, the alteration of his body. Seven years passed. The snakes appeared again. A second blow restored what the first had taken.
The familiar account ended there.
Euenos waited.
“At first,” Tiresias said, “I believed the greater marvel was that I had become a woman. I was mistaken. The greater marvel was becoming a man again.”
“Why?”
“Because so little was restored.”
He took Euenos’s hand and placed it against his chest.
“Here,” Tiresias said.
There was only an old man’s breastbone, the sparse white hair, a slow beat beneath it.
“What am I meant to feel?”
“Nothing. That is the difficulty.”
Then Tiresias moved Euenos’s hand a few inches lower.
“I know this old body of mine. I have occupied it longer than you have occupied yours. But there are places in it which remember what is no longer there.”
Euenos thought of soldiers who still felt pain in amputated limbs.
“The breasts?”
“Yes.”
“And the rest?”
Tiresias smiled.
“Oh the rest most of all.”
Euenos had imagined this meeting many times. In some versions he asked questions. In others he merely listened. None had included the calm with which Tiresias now removed his robe.
Euenos understood that he was being offered neither proof nor seduction. The distinction embarrassed him.
He too undressed.
The bronze multiplied their nakedness around the room. Age beside youth, youth beside age. The curvature of the walls made some bodies narrow and others broad. One reflection seemed to give Tiresias the hips of a woman. Euenos knew this was an imperfection in the metal. Knowing it did not prevent him from looking.
Tiresias reached over and touched the young man’s face.
“You want to know whether the body recalls what it has lost.”
“Yes.”
“That isn’t what you really want to know.”
Euenos said nothing.
The prophet kissed him.
The kiss was without mystery.
As Tiresias’s hands travelled over him, Euenos became conscious of an error in the room. He could not locate it. At moments the hand upon his back seemed to belong to the old man Tiresias; at others it seemed to arrive from the bronze. Once, unmistakably, he felt the pressure of other fingers against his chest while both of Tiresias’s hands were at his waist.
He stepped away.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. But I remember it.”
Euenos almost laughed.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“No.”
Tiresias kissed him again.
Something followed which Euenos could never afterward arrange into a reliable sequence. He remembered kneeling. He remembered Tiresias drawing him upright and turning him around. He remembered the old man’s mouth against his shoulder and the peculiar certainty that another mouth, softer and unknown to him, had occupied the same place.
He remembered Tiresias entering him.
At that instant the room altered. The bronze continued to return the same bodies, but Euenos felt, with an assurance more certain than sight, that the same act was occurring twice. Tiresias was behind him. Tiresias was also receiving him.
Euenos gazed into the bronze. His reflection faced him at the distance of a hand. Behind it stood Tiresias; behind Tiresias another Euenos; behind that another blind man; and so on, into the dim curve of the chamber.
Among them, intermittently, was a woman. Euenos could not describe her face because whenever he tried to look directly at it he saw Tiresias.
“Who is she?”
The movement behind him stopped.
“Where?”
“The woman in the bronze.”
Tiresias turned his blind eyes toward the wall.
For the first time since Euenos had entered the chamber, the prophet looked afraid.
“Don’t look for her.”
“Why?”
“Because I did.”
They remained motionless.
Then Tiresias put his mouth against Euenos’s neck and began again.
Pleasure complicated the error. Euenos could no longer say with certainty which sensations belonged to him. There was the pressure within his body; there was also, impossibly, the sensation of exerting that pressure. His hands against the bronze seemed touched from the opposite side.
He shut his eyes.
The woman remained.
He understood then what Pherecydes had omitted. The two pleasures were not greater than one. Nor were they opposites. The terror lay precisely in their resemblance.
Euenos cried out.
The woman answered.
Silence followed.
When Euenos opened his eyes, Tiresias was beside him. Euenos could not remember the moment at which they had separated.
The bronze showed two men.
He searched the reflections.
Two men.
Again.
Two.
Tiresias dressed. Euenos found his robe on the floor with the scrap of Pherecydes beneath it:
He remembered both pleasures.
He turned it over. There was writing on the reverse. Euenos was certain there had been none before.
The hand resembled his own.
The snakes were not two.
He read the sentence twice.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
Tiresias had already reached the stair.
“I don’t know.”
“But you are Tiresias.”
The blind man stopped.
“That is how I know.”
Then he climbed out toward the daylight.
Euenos remained in the circular room. On the bronze wall his reflection waited with him.
He raised his hand.
It did not.
🜁🜄🜂🜃
Pip McGough (he/him) is a UK-based poet and freelance writer. His poem “Render Error: After Gaza” was nominated for the 2026 Pushcart Prize. His work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Madrid Review, Wildscape, Azarao, numerous other magazines, and likewise featured in several anthologies. In his poetry and prose he explores the intersections of myth and modernity, gender and identity, politics and folklore. He has established a large following for his writing on Instagram as @manifest_gothic.