The facts known to the audience do not square with the herdsman’s characterization of Iokaste’s response to “inauspicious prophecies” as shrinking back “in fear” (ὄκνῳ), for while she did fear Laios’ death at the hands of their child, she had not shrunk back in fear from intercourse with her husband, and when she conceived and delivered a child, she did not hesitate to challenge the god himself to make good on his prophetic word. [Md] [Apa] Indeed, the confidence she displayed in her own ability to obstruct the god’s endeavors was so unnatural that she was willing to sacrifice her son’s life to this cause, thereby doubling the god’s grounds for exercising whatever powers he might have to save the child. The sacrifice of a child in arrogant refusal to submit to the god’s will is in fact an anti-sacrifice, an affront to pious men and gods alike. [P] Considering again Athenian willingness to put the lives of its men at hazard rather than submit to the god’s will by consulting at Delphi, Athenian policy amounts to a similar affront to both pious men and their gods. [Gt-a] That the herdsman presents such thinking as a reasonable explanation for the sacrifice of a child’s life suggests that he may not be a pious man. The same observation would apply to Athenians offering as an explanation for their willingness to send their sons off to war their fear of the prophecy that Apollo would help Sparta to gain the victory. The herdsman’s piety comes into question by another path as well, for his comment confirms that he has known all along about the prophecies touching upon Laios, Iokaste, and any male offspring they may have. Indeed, his reference to prophecies squares with Aeschylus’ account of several prophecies and accords only to a slightly lesser extent with Iokaste’s earlier account of one prophecy (l. 711); she must have told him why she was ordering him to take the child to the wilderness to be left to die. This means that he should have understood that by complying with her he would join her effort to defeat the god, but by disobeying her to save the infant he would serve the god’s cause. His inclination to save the child would have been strengthened by this consideration. Perhaps he did not feel he was sealing Laios’ fate—the odds were steeply stacked against it. But he was not acting against the god. He might have pitied the child and shrunk in fear from opposition to Apollo. The two motives combined urged his transference of the living infant to the Corinthian shepherd. When he saw Laios killed, surely he considered whether the killer might not be the child he had saved and wondered how Apollo had arranged it. This question would have been in his mind when as he miraculously escaped with his life and even more so when he saw the same man who killed Laios solve the riddle of the Sphinx and be made Thebes’ ruler. He would have been even more horrified to see that man married to Iokaste. That certainly would have caused him to shrink back in fear (ὄκνῳ) and confusion and so to withdraw as far as possible from the palace. So, when he says that Iokaste withdrew in fear from prophecy, he may be speaking more from his own perspective about his own feelings of awe, dread, and incomprehension. The audience, which consisted in part of ordinary citizens like the herdsman, might identify with his hesitation in the face of prophecy’s demonstrated power and appreciate the fact that, if it was not to affront the god by acting contrary to the necessity to which prophecy speaks, its only hope lay in pursuing a consultation of its own to discover what precisely its present role should be. [Mipd] Athens should consider that the god is even now at work to realize his prophetic word and that his voice may even now be heard speaking through Athenian lips. Indeed, this play provides Apollo with an ideal forum to address the assembled polity. [Apcma]