In asking Oidipous to confirm that his concerns bear upon his birth parents, the word φυτευσάντων is heard for the third time (previously used at ll. 793 and 1007, cf. m1007). Speaking of the pollution of his parents, the stranger can be taken to mean that pollution might come not from what Oidipous does to his parents but what he receives from them. [Gd] The double entendre suggests that his problems are hereditary. The pollution originates in his parents’ disobedience to the god. [P] [Aj] [Mw] But while Oidipous may have inherited pollution from his parents (indeed he would never even have been born had they obeyed the god), he is also himself engendering pollution, not through parricide and incest, the deeds he sought to avoid, but through the effort to avoid them, for they were communicated to him by prophecy, just as prophecy had communicated the prohibition on intercourse to Laios and Iokaste. The effort to avoid parricide and incest entails voiding prophecy, an act of impiety quite similar to his parents attempt to void prophecy by arranging for the death of their infant child. Rather than endeavoring not to pollute himself with parricide and incest, Oidipous needed to concern himself with cleansing himself of the pollution he had already incurred simply through the fact of his birth, a fact about which he could know nothing without the god’s help. The god at Delphi seems to have wished to communicate to him that this cleansing entailed the sacrificial killing of his biological father. [Mi] [Ad] [Mpei] [Mipd]