This statement is in a form that indicates reported speech; the herdsman is presumably repeating what he was told by Iokaste as she formulated it, as she received it from Laios, or as Laios received it from the prophet, but this formulation permits of two radically opposed meanings: “the prophecy was that he he kill his parents” or “that his parents kill him. The herdsman might have interpreted Iokaste’s action as reluctant obedience to the god. His alteration to the prophecy to include both parents might reflect his misunderstanding; he thought that they were both required by prophecy to destroy their newborn. Pitying both infant and mother, he, like Oidipous when he received a similarly worded prophecy concerning his father, may have decided to take matters into his own hands and save the baby. Looking at it from this perspective, the herdsman did not, as the audience may have been supposing, support the god by deceiving his masters; he helped his masters by defying the god. The shift in interpretation is easily traceable to the circumstances under which the words were received; by the time that the herdsman first hears of the prophecy, the baby has been born and so the prohibition on intercourse between Laios and Iokaste is no longer relevant and need not have been recounted to him. The prophecy was reduced to a horrible prediction, which in its transmission might have been misinterpreted; Iokaste meant him to understand that the child would grow up to kill his father, but he understood her to say that the father must kill his son. What the god meant as a threat the herdsman now misunderstands as a curse and he has reversed the force of the action. Ambiguity in the present wording suggests that changing perspectives and circumstances subject communicative exchanges to reinterpretation and may even rewrite them. This pertains to any speech act that is recalled, reconsidered, and repeated over time. When Athens considers from its own perspective the Delphic prophecy intended to encourage the Spartans to go to war, it may recognize that it may easily have been distorted. Athens, like the herdsman, may have interpreted the reported speech as a curse, to which the only practical response is acceptance or resistance. Or Athens may have inverted subject and object, making it unclear whether the god said Sparta will defeat Athens or Athens will defeat Sparta. The fact that the reported prophecy might have been misreported or misinterpreted in two different respects presents Athens with a practical dilemma: what to make of the prophecy? Athens has in fact been shrinking from Delphi, but it might now recognize that its interpretation of the reported prophecy could have been influenced by its fear that the god would side with Sparta. It has wrongly been presuming that the prophecy would be inauspicious. In order to clear up any misinterpretation before deciding on its own best course of action, Athens might now send its own delegation to Delphi to seek clarification and direction. [Mpe] [Mipd]