The Chorus is expressing its realization that Oidipous’s actions have been judged by one who sees all things: a god. The statement ends, however, with a surprise—it names the sentence’s subject, known by the audience to be Apollo, χρόνος, “time,” not the Titan, Zeus’s father, but an abstraction by the same name. With this error the Chorus shows itself utterly to have failed to grasp the essential message carried by the revelation of Oidipous’s crimes. [Mpei] Its ignorance betrays a skepticism towards the gods as profound as that earlier expressed by Iokaste and Oidipous. This skepticism reveals the piety to which the Chorus seemed to give expression in the preceding stasimon, when it imagined (albeit erroneously) that Oidipous would soon be shown to be a descendant of one of the gods, to have been misleading, for on the one hand, the Chorus takes Apollo’s carefully designed and executed plan to be the working of “time”—or in other words, blind chance and changing circumstance; on the other hand, the Chorus is ready to believe its ruler to be the direct offspring of a god, which means that it takes him to be the next-best thing to a god. Given the audience’s awareness of Oidipous’s many limitations, and the god’s far greater powers, finding Oidipous to be godlike only puts on display the Chorus’s ignorance both of the facts and of the stark difference between mortals and gods. Such ignorance and false assumptions are dangerous, for when a sex offender can be taken for a god’s offspring and when a god’s complex long-term project can be mistaken for the product of an abstraction like time, mortals cannot meaningfully interact with their gods; they live as if the domains of gods and mortals were disjoined even when they are not. [Mpea] [Mi] [D] These errors place the Thebans in the same practical position as Iokste when she earlier showed herself to be the proponent of the philosophical view that domains of gods and mortals are forever and in every way separate. Since that position was current in Athens at the time of this play’s production, the audience may see the danger in its own muddling of the relationship between itself and its gods, either because it believes its own leaders to have quasi-divine powers or because it views significant events as the products of unguided forces, such as time, change, or chance. As the audience recognizes the danger in the Chorus’s confusion, it will seek to map out a clearer set of criteria that distinguish divine from mortal forces. Divine forces cannot be mistaken for abstractions. Rather, the gods must be understood to have a strong interest in events on the human plane, they must have projects that bear upon mortal wellbeing, and they must be possessed of the will and the power to realize their projects. Divine involvement can take a number of forms: through their ability to alter and shape circumstances the gods may interact with mortals and through their ability to utilize mortal speech they may communicate to mortals the requirement for mortal participation in projects bearing upon their wellbeing. [Apcm] [Apao]