When Oidipous says that he sees the shepherd whom “we so long have sought,” does he mean since he decided to speak with the sole surviving witness to the incident at the crossroads (l. 765) or since he decided to learn more about his own origins from the shepherd who served Laios (l. 1045)? The latter should be excluded, because it has not been only a matter of minutes, but even the former cannot fairly be described by πάλαι, which means “long ago,” “of old,” and therefore resonates well beyond the bounds of his intended meaning, bringing to the audience’s mind a host of more distant events reaching back to his visit to Delphi in search of the same information that he hopes now to obtain now. In that case, it is not he who is speaking, but the unseen agent and communicator Apollo, whom the audience may understand to be pointing with this declaration to the long-awaited revelation of the key relationships of which Oidipous still remains ignorant: how the signal incidents of his life (birth, rescue, drunken insult, visit to Delphi, encounter with Laios, Sphinx, marriage, rule over Thebes, and plague) have been arranged to meet a necessity of which the god tried to inform him. [Dnc] [Dnp] Thus, as Oidipous shows off his powers of deduction through his ability to identify the man currently approaching from offstage, the audience will be prompted to note the almost laughable limitations of his deductive powers, which are dwarfed by Apollo’s capacity to work for decades past a succession of obstacles, many introduced by the mortal agents whose cooperation he required, to bring this moment to pass. [Gd] [Apcmu] [Apamu] [Apaon] [Apaos] [Apaos]