Inferring from the herdsman’s restatement that he is “driving for delay,” Oidipous again betrays how his mind is dulled or misled by his own impatience. The herdsman may well be allowing his speech to reflect his subjection to the god’s needs to the point even of allowing the god to decide when he must live and when he may die. τριβὰς means “delay” by way of metaphor—the wearing away or wasting of time through rubbing. Oidipous might consequently be heard to say that the elderly shepherd is “driving towards a rubbing away” (i.e. “gradual destruction”)—but whose? If this comment seems to mean that the herdsman is driving at Oidipous’s destruction, the audience knows that this is not at all the case, for the shepherd has always done what he could on Oidipous’s behalf, first saving him from exposure and then later doing his utmost to avoid bringing Oidipous’s intolerable deeds to light. The audience will understand, consequently, that if anyone has been driving towards Oidipous’s destruction, it is either the god or Oidipous himself (or both). Oidipous appears throughout his life to have been driving towards the destruction that is now finally about to be accomplished through his investigation, which was prompted by the plague and ordered by the god speaking through the Pythia. Oidipous’s present words sugest, further, that a man (ἀνὴρ), and in fact this man (ἀνὴρ ὅδ᾽) appears to be responsible, and while by “this man” he means the herdsman, the audience can make better sense of the words if they are taken to refer to Oidipous; it is his resistance (not the herdsman’s) that has made his destruction necessary. Indeed, looking back to Laios, it seems that repeated mortal resistance to the god has made it necessary for the god repeatedly to step in to direct the proceedings. It is the mortal’s drive to resist that has both necessitated the god’s intervention and that gives the god in turn the means by which to effect it. When mortals resist divine instruction, Apollo turns them against themselves. [Md] [Mw] [Aj] [Apamu]