When Oidipous claims never to have looked upon Laios, the audience knows by dint of its familiarity with the Oidipous myth that this statement is false, for he killed Laios and so certainly saw him, though he was ignorant of the man’s name and the kinship between them. Oidipous himself appears, however, to underscore the distinction between sensual perception and knowledge through his use of the two verbs ἔξοιδα and εἰσεῖδον. Both are based on the same stem ([w]id, from which also comes the Latin video), but their prefixes suggest movement in opposite directions: out of and into. This opposition implies that while he never yet got a look “into” the man from the outside, Kreon’s verbal report enables him to know Laios thoroughly “from the inside out.” The audience knows this to be false; Oidipous still knows nothing about his relationship to Laios. There are two ways in which listening has failed to make an impression on Oidipous. First, Kreon has given Oidipous sufficient information to infer his probable involvement in Laios’s death, for learning that the murder victim ruled in Thebes right up until (πρίν) the time when Oidipous arrived there and knowing that he himself had killed a man immediately prior to his arrival in Thebes, it is striking that he fails even fleetingly to consider this coincidence. “Laios was killed immediately before I arrived,” he might reason, “and immediately before I arrived, I killed a man; therefore, I may have killed Laios.” Second, when he killed Laios he had recently received a prophecy that he must kill his father, so when he then does kill a man, he should reason, “This might be my father.” It is ironic that the god’s words to him do not enable him to recognize his father when he kills him, but now he believes that he thoroughly knows Laios from details he is receiving from Kreon, from whom he has learned nothing more than the man’s name and approximate date of death. The magnitude of Oidipous’s failure to make use of what he hears, whether from a god or from a man, raises a profoundly troubling question about the basis for knowledge, for clearly there is an enormous gap between information, on the one hand, whether gathered directly from sensory perception or garnered from the speech of others, and meaningful, useful recognition and understanding. His inability to “see” what he “saw,” what he was foretold, or what he is told after the fact suggests that something is obstructing Oidipous’s capacity to make sense of information. That the syllable οἰδ- in his name occurs in both “know” and “swollen” suggests a connection between these words; a swelling of the mind is laming his ability to make sense either of the data furnished by his eyes or the messages he receives through his ears. Rather than looking upon him as the doctor capable of curing the city’s ills, the audience may look upon him rather as needing help akin to medical treatment, a means for bringing down the swelling of his brain and thus enabling him to think clearly. [Mpe]