The herdsman’s response indicates that he has interpreted Oidipous’s question strictly from his own perspective; he takes χρεία to refer not to any of the forces or pressures of which the audience has become aware but strictly to the order given him by Iokaste. It is interesting that, like Oidipous reporting what was said to him at Delphi, the herdsman expresses the verb in the optative mood. Unlike Oidipous at Delphi, he understands that “necessity” pertains to an order. He, like Oidipous, Laios, and Iokaste decided not to obey. This series of similarities and dissimilarities highlights a further and highly significant difference: Oidipous, Laios, and Iokaste disobey the god, while the herdsman disobeys Iokaste. Her disobeience puts the herdsman’s disobedience in harmony with the god. Indeed, the parallel between Iokaste and the Pythia further suggests that Iokaste’s speech, which the herdsman understood as orders for him to carry out on her behalf, might, like the Pythia’s, express a message from the god. Indeed, the audience can easily interpret the herdsman’s answer from the perspective of the role that necessity requires him to play: the one who must be destroyed (νιν) was not Oidipous but Laios. This corroborates the audience’s supposition that the god was indeed on the scene and actively managing affairs to realize his prophetic word when Iokaste gave the herdsman the infant. Indeed, the god appears to have been communicating in double entendre even then. [Gd] This reveals that even as she endeavored to save Laios at the cost of her infant son’s life and thereby thwart prophecy and the god, Iokaste was herself being made to speak and act on the god’s behalf. So, while the herdsman responds to the question of necessity in relation to Iokaste’s instruction to him, the audience will understand that the god can turn not only speech and action but a person’s inmost perceptions and judgments to service of a necessity to which all, including Apollo himself, must bow. [Dn]