Relying on myth, the audience can make an altogether different prediction: by the next full moon Oidipous will have discovered his involvement in parricide and incest. [Gm] Instead of celebrating his glory, the people of Thebes will share his despair. Oidipous will be known to have brought death to Laios and Iokaste and pollution to the city. Kithairon will be known as the place where Oidipous met and killed Laios, the place where he was exposed as an infant, and the place where he was saved by the god in order that he fulfill prophecy by murdering Laios. His flight from incest and parricide failed; instead, it brought pollution to Thebes. So not only do the Chorus’s predictions fall far short of any measure of accuracy, its view of the Kithaironian wilderness will prove to have been romantic myth-making. Arrogating to itself the authority to make up any myths it likes, the populace makes a significant error in judgment. [Mpea] Where the Chorus would make the wilderness the agent of the town’s salvation, the audience has seen that the real agent of action powerful enough to save or destroy a town is neither the heavens nor the landscape but the god working through agents mortal and daemonic: shepherds, sphinx, Oracle, and even Oidipous and Laios themselves. [Apao] [Apam] Thus any similarity between the Chorus’s speech and effective prophecy or valid myth is at best superficial. By arrogating to themselves powers belonging to the gods, the townsmen not only show their limitations but express a contemnible disregard for divine power and prerogative. [P] If a prediction is safely to be made, it is that such disregard will result in the town’s destruction. [Mw]