The tower metaphor employed here and elsewhere in the play is drawn from the vocabulary of epic warfare with its emphasis on single combat. Any mortal who engages in single combat with a god can expect to fail. If Oidipous’s success against the Sphinx seems to suggest otherwise, this misprision works as an indictment of anyone who would credit and welcome such a victory. In actual fact the Sphinx appears now to represent a defeat masquerading as mortal victory over divine powers. The protective “tower” built by the city’s leadership does not shield it from harm but rather endangers it by calling down upon it the negative attentions of an angry god, who then fills it with corpses. Indeed, where the Chorus must mean a tower built to shield “against” the dead, the construction permits a reading that the tower is full “of” the dead, a situation realized quite literally in Athens, where the plague filled with the bodies of the dead those Athenian walls that had just been extended to give safety to the many citizens whose homes lay in the countryside outside the city. Thus, the Chorus’s praise of its ruler will ring out in Athens as a condemnation of its leadership for arrogantly claiming to command sufficient means to shield the populace. [Gt-a] [Gd] [Mg] [P] [Aj] [Mpea]