The audience learns that as Iokaste passed through the palace to her bedchamber, she was beside herself. It will recall that while she was showing signs of distress as she last left the stage, she was far from hysterical; if she had already resolved to die, she controlled herself in order to protect Oidipous. Her care for him was stronger than her dismay. Once she had left him, however, she gave way to her intense emotion. To express the idea that she was “frantic,” or more literally: “being attacked by passion,” the staffer uses a participial form (χρωμένη) identical with that of another verb, whose meaning is “to consult an oracle,” so that the speech can be understood thus: “consulting in a passiontate state, she passed into the chamber.” This conjures up the image of Iokaste entering into the consultation chamber at Delphi; something she never did, for she has ironically always been passionately committed to reason. Her present despair upon recognition that Delphi has proven its power is antithetical to everything she has stood for; she has reversed her own habitual stance. The connection made here between consultation at Delphi and subjection to passion richly suggests that her commitment to reason is itself a kind of passion that led her to reject prophecy. Now she is bereft of reason, which has in any case proven a false guide, and she is denied recourse to the god’s counsel, for she has opposed it so thoroughly as to compel him to make an example of her. Now she has nothing left but to accept the fact that her life has reached a dead end with every effort failed, every philosophical premise rejected. [Mpea] [Mw] Stripped now of her confidence in her own reason and its capacity to understand circumstances and devise appropriate responses to them, she has nothing on which to fall back; she has no steady reference point from which to check her raging emotions. Having alienated the god, she has no refuge. [Mi] The same might apply to Oidipous and anyone else (e.g., Athens) who trusts mortal reason to the extent that one ignores or even challenges prophecy. [Gt-a]