When Iokaste does not immediately respond to the Chorus’s suggestion to identify the shepherd who once worked for Laios, Oidipous has a word with her. His insistence on an answer suggests that he recognizes the significance of this point, although it is hard to determine what he thinks its implications are. He may sense that she was misleading him when she implied that the survivor’s request deserved to be granted simply because of what he had endured at the crossroads (ll. 763-4), but even so, he does not seem to infer that if she knows the shepherd who gave the Corinthian the baby, it was because it was her baby and she who gave it to the shepherd. Oidipous also strangely refers to the man for whom his wife sent as “whomever” (ὃντιν᾽) as if to emphasize the indefiniteness of his identity. Rather than jumping to conclusions, Oidipous appears to be shying from them. He persists in posing questions to clarify what he has heard, yet at this point his questions suggest that he is delaying or resisting discoveries that have already been made and hardly require confirmation. The interrogation is taking on the character of a riddle that hinges on obscuring obvious relationships by the overuse of indefinite signifiers. It is as though Oidipous were beginning to speak in the language of the Sphinx, and yet for once his speech reveals not more than the meaning of its words, but less. His language does not appear to be under divine direction. Riddling speech is in this instance characteristic not of the god (as is thought to be the case with Delphic prophecy) but rather of one who prefers not to attend to the truth of what the god has to say. [Md] Characterization of Delphic prophecy as riddling may, from this perspective, serve skeptics as grounds cynically to dismiss the unwanted messages it may deliver. [Mipd]