“Long ago” (πάλαι) supports the audience’s probing into the more distant past to find the “unmarried marriage.” The most distant option is the marriage between Iokaste and Laios, which was not to include intercourse, which the Chorus believes to be judged by time. The audience, on the other hand, sees Apollo as the unseen agent behind this myth’s principal events. It is he, then, who can be presumed to judge. Double entendre in the Chorus’s ambiguous language confirms that Apollo judged the marriage between Laios and Iokaste, which appears only to have been made problematic by Apollo’s prohibition on marital intercourse. The riddle in the Chorus’s present language shifts the focus of attention to the marriage itself. There is something about it that drew Apollo’s judgment. The prohibition on intercourse may have been more than a test of the couple’s piety. Like the later apparent prediction of an incestuous marriage between mother and son, it seems to have been the divine response to an attitude already sufficiently improper to require divine intervention. The test of piety is not created to bait and trap mortals; its function is to allow mortals the opportunity to manifest the impiety embedded in their attitudes or to retreat from those attitudes. Iokaste’s two marriages suggest that, as the inclination towards impiety is passed from one generation to the next, it compounds itself, with the implication that it will continue to enlarge until some future generation puts a stop to it by submitting to the god for instructions, how to purge itself of its inherited taint. As the Chorus presently fails to see these imlications, it exhibits symptoms of the contamination and threatens its city with a fresh round of ills. As it recognizes the Chorus’s errors, the Athenian audience is given an opportunity to correct beliefs and attitudes established over at least two generations (πάλαι), that Athens can proceed without submitting to the god for instruction, especially in relation to intra-familial relations, which be understood as a metaphor for relations among Greek cities. Just as the Athenian audience interprets plague and prophecies made by the Oracle at Delphi as signs of Apollo’s interest in helping Thebes purge itself of its impiety, it should interpret plague and prophecies made by the Oracle at Delphi as signs of Apollo’s interest in guidng Athens to purge itself of its own impiety. [Gd] [Mpea] [Aj] [P] [Gt-a] [Ad] [Mw]