Modern criticism has noted the importance of sexual secrets and gender ambivalence in the myths that recount how Teiresias lost his vision and became a diviner. l Callimachus' Hymn to Athena, one of the texts that feature this myth, has lately been scrutinised for the ambiguous sexual identity of its protagonists. The primary narrator, for example, has qualities that mark her out both as a iemale celebrant of the Argive ritual and as a maie scholar-poet.2 Recent studies hâve also found Callimachus' Athena excessively masculine, «almost to the point of caricature»,3 or to the degree of being «pre or asexual a female pushed into the maie sphere, marked by a rejection of marriage and an association with war».4