Each new specification of the rhetorical question prompts the audience to supply an answer. The Chorus can be presumed to be thinking of Oidipous’s many efforts (πόνοις) on behalf of the town he has ruled, but the audience will think of the efforts made by him and his parents to prevent realization of the prophecies given them by the Pythia. This answers the rhetorical questions just posed by Chorus and god; one can measure the degree of both unhappiness and culpability by the lengths to which Oidipous, Iokaste, and Laios have gone to stymie the god. Oidipous never yielded in the slightest to the necessity that he kill his father and sleep with his mother, and it is this single-mindedness that makes his failure the more notable, spectacular, lamentable, and, if one accepts the ethical implications of ἀθλιώτερος, reprehensible. The actions of Laios and Iokaste are if anything more reprehensible, for they were offered a way to satisfy divine instruction without killing a family member or engaging in incest; they had to forego the generation of an heir. There must, then, have been another way for Oidipous to respond to the prophecy that he must kill his father and marry his mother. Based on insights the audience has already developed, a more appropriate response would have had two components: 1) willingness to do whatever the god might declare to be necessary, and 2) framing sufficient questions to discover precisely what action Apollo required. [P] [Md] [Mip] As the audience has learned, the god’s instructions to Oidipous were not as onerous as he thought; had he known all the facts he might not have found the killing of his father altogether objectionable (the incident at the crossroads shows that he was in fact willing to kill him even for a slight offense), and it may not have been necessary for him to marry his mother. Athens, rather than enlarging its impiety by resisting the god’s prophecy (an effort that, judging by the events on stage, is in any case doomed to certain failure) should submit to whatever the god might deem necessary. To discover this, the city should frame a series of questions to put to the Oracle at Delphi. If Athens follows this procedure, it can expect to be presented with a solution that is less onerous both than it presently believes and than the fate presently in store for it. [Mw]