The herdsman’s subterfuge appears to have succeeded in throwing Oidipous off the track, for he now inquires if the child was (as he has already been supposing) a slave. But of what significance could that be to Oidipous? He would still have killed Laios and he would still have killed his father. He would not, however, have fulfilled the complementary prophecies. This suggests that it is of utmost importance to him to prove that prophecy has neither authenticity nor legitimacy. But if this were the case, many other actions would be deprived of their meaning as well; his present investigation would not have any potential for ridding Thebes of plague just as there would have been no need to expose the infant and no need for either Laios or Oidipous to travel to Delphi, and so they need not have met. This puts the audience in the position of making its own judgment: either everything that has happened is meaningful or nothing is; either there is an amazing complementarity between the prophecy that Laios would be killed by his son and the prophecy that Oidipous would kill his father, or it is a meaningless accident, and the same goes for the complementarity between these prophecies and the fact that Oidipous is both Laios’ killer and son, between Laios’ efforts to avert prophecy and Oidipous’s, between Laios’ being on the road from Thebes to Delphi to consult at the moment when Oidipous is on the same road coming from Delphi where he has just consulted, between Laios’ departing Thebes for Delphi because of his inability to solve the riddle of the Sphinx and Oidipous’s being made a permanent resident of Thebes as her king because of his capacity to solve that same riddle. [Dc] Oidipous seems to suffer from a mental block that prevents him from making the most obvious connections. The impediment to his thinking can be traced to his refusal to give full and thoughtful consideration to the prophecy he received, for if he is absolutely certain both that Polybos and Merope are his parents and that he can subvert Apollo’s prophecy simply by avoiding contact with them, this certainty is built upon a decision to ignore the contrary possibility even after having been given reason to consider it seriously enough to undertake a consultation at Delphi to clear it up. He has been stupidly insistent upon regarding Polybos and Merope as his parents because this was the only way in which he could create a basis from which to avoid doing what prophecy said he must. His catastrophe can be traced to a monolithic determination to evade the fulfillment of a prophecy that he simply refused to accept. [Mpei] [Md] [Mipd]