When Oidipous insists that the waxing and waning of chance events defined who he was as child and who he has become as a man (με μικρὸν καὶ μέγαν διώρισαν), he appears to be considering the mystery surrounding his birth as well as the events that elevated him to rule over Thebes. Prompted by this suggestion, the audience will measure what it knows about his circumstances in view of two competing principles: either Apollo has dictated the most significant events of Oidipous’s life or these were the product of chance. When Laios and Iokaste decided to have their child taken to a trackless waste and left there they intended to prevent Apollo’s dictation of their life events. For parents who wish both to destroy an unwanted child and also to submit their lives to the dictates of the gods, exposure affords them moral protection, for when they place the child in the wild, they place its fate in the gods’ hands. Being unwilling to submit their lives to Apollo, when Laios and Iokaste ordered their baby to be left out in the wilderness, they presumably thought that they were putting their faith in chance, but this was a semantic nicety, a technicality, for they were certain that the infant would die. The exposure of an infant to chance only works as a technicality, however, if there is some possibility, no matter how slight, that the infant survive. Here the principles of chance and divine intervention overlap and complement one another. Oidipous and Iokaste believe in neither gods nor chance; they believe that it is they theselves who control all things. Yet just the possibility of the baby’s survival provided the god all the opportunity he needed to execute an astoundingly complex and far-sighted plan aimed at restoring civic health to the city of Thebes. Seen in this light, Oidipous’s survival demonstrates the dangers of redefining the principle of τύχη in terms of chance; first, because chance is used as a license for even the most opprobrious behavior, and second, because chance in the form even of the remotest possibility gives the gods an opening through which to work their will. Chance in the form of probability cannot have arranged for Oidipous to be both Iokaste’s son and her husband—the odds against their marriage must be truly astronomical. This makes it clear that not chance but a god has arranged circumstances such that the son and the mother be brought together (μειχθεῖναι/μιγῆναι) in such a way as to reveal to both of them the error in their assumptions, the clear-sightedness of prophecy, and the gods’ capacity to do what has to be done. [Mpea] [Apcma] [Apa] [Dnc]