Serpent Visions is set in Bronze Age Greece, approximately 1300 BCE, when bards and rhapsodes spoke and sang old tales to spellbound audiences. Teiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes, knows he will die soon. He must entrust his longtime secret story to the right person while he can. Enter his daughter Manto, last seen many years before when she was a small child.

At first Teiresias asks only that she listen to his tale. When he asks her to pass it on, Manto, who has no wish to be a rhapsode, makes no promise except to listen to every word. Serpent Visions is the story he tells her of a long life influenced by the gods—including two changes of gender.

Two generations before the Trojan war, the epic wars were between brothers and cousins of the Theban royal family of Oedipus. These stories became the Thebiad, the first Greek epic which survives in fragments. Manto has been credited with creating it.

Before Manto sought him out, Teiresias was involved with the Theban royal family, Oedipus Rex, his ancestors, and his descendants. We know parts of these stories from Greek tragedies of fifth century Athens by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus and others surviving as fragments or titles.

Homer’s epics weren’t put in written form until some four-hundred years elapsed after the Trojan War he depicts. During those centuries, the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey were told orally, so we have various versions. Homer depicts the gods as familiar. Readers already know that Zeus and Hera, king and queen on Mount Olympus, are antagonistic and why some gods help the Greeks and some the Trojans. Even after Homer, literacy wasn’t widespread, and  bards read them aloud.

In various myths, Teiresias lives over generations, as does Manto: rhapsodes weren’t especially concerned with time lines. Doubtful that Manto actually wrote the Thebiad, but she did save and speak it.

Welcome to Serpent Visions, the extraordinary tale of Teiresias from his own lips.