Replying that he doesn’t know (οὐκ οἶδ᾽· ὁ δοὺς), but the man who handed the baby to him would know who pierced its ankles, the Corinthian makes another unintended pun on the name of Oidipous (two puns have already been heard at ll. 924 and 926). This time the name seems to mean: “he does not know roads” (ὃδους), and so the statement might seem to rather to inquire back: “Doesn’t Know-The-Roads understand these things better than I?” The knowledge of the roads to which the pun seems to refer derives from Oidipous’s travels to Delphi and thence to Thebes and the encounters that happened on the way: killings followed by solution of the Sphinx’s riddle and then the marriage in which that feat resulted. But as the pun suggests, Oidipous does not understand the roads any better than he understands the marks on his ankles. He should have deduced that the man he killed might be his father and the woman he married might be his mother. He also already has sufficient information to know that he must be the baby that was exposed. Iokaste has already told him how her child was treated, and so the marks on his ankles should enable him to connect himself with her child and identify her as his mother. If he were to understand, as he should, that the prophecy given Laios and Iokaste required that he not die, he is also in a position to infer that regardless what mortal participated, the rescue must be attributed to Apollo. This idea was implied by the unintended meaning of the question that the Corinthian is now answering. Thus, the Corinthian’s pun implies that Oidipous’s incomprehension of his own experience stems from his disregard for prophecy. If he were utilizing prophecy to make sense of the circumstances of his life, he would immediately ask Iokaste, who is standing beside him, if this man’s story was true. Or he should be knocked senseless by the thought that the woman to whom he has been married for years is his mother and that she acquiesced or participated in the effort to eliminate him. He would be realizing that he would be dead now if the god had not saved him from her, but also that the god must have arranged his marriage to her. He should be proceeding to the idea that he has been wrong about so many things, but especially about Apollo’s role in his life. As Christopher Rocco observes, this pun refers “not only to Oidipous’s decision to flee Corinth to avoid fulfilling the prophecy and to his encounter with Laius at the place where three roads meet, but also to his inability correctly to decipher the signs on the roads and thus control the direction of his travel and of his life” (p. 46). To understand his life’s paths he should first have to acknowledge and concern himself with the god’s unflagging interest in them. [Gd] [Mpei] [Ad]