Upon what action might “unwilling” (ἄκονθ᾽) bear? It is due solely to Oidipous’s willing cooperation with the instructions he received from Delphi that he has discovered himself to be the cause of Thebes’ pollution, which makes it clear that he would not willingly have polluted either the city or himself, and yet it was his unwillingness to murder his father and marry his mother that resulted in the city’s pollution. Oidipous’s willingness and unwillingness are a paradox; they confront the audience with a conundrum upon whose solution, like the Sphinx’s riddle, the city’s health depends. Given the choice between willingly serving the god and unwillingly killing his father and marrying his mother, Oidipous should have chosen to cooperate. After all, willing or not (as events showed) he was bound to kill his father. Doing so as instructed would have changed the meaning of the action he had to perform; it would have put Oidipous on a cooperative footing with Apollo and it would have spared Thebes pollution. He should therefore have subordinated his own judgment to the god’s dictates. Athens might learn from his mistakes: it should regard prophecy as an avenue for cooperation rather than hostility with its gods and it should willingly perform whatever action the god sets forth regardless how distasteful or illadvised that may seem to be. [Mpea] [Md] [Mip]