Iokaste concludes her recollection of the prophecy according to which Laios had to die at his son’s hands and leave her to bear children to that son. This second point has, however, not previously been mentioned by her. If it was indeed part of the original prophecy, as now appears to be the case, then it seems strange that she should never before have thought to recount it. This presents the audience with a new problem to solve; it must try to understand her omission of this significant point, especially considering that Oidipous has mentioned the children resulting from incest as part of the prophecy he received (ll. 789-92). The audience might suppose that by focusing on the first part of the prophecy given Laios and dealing with it by arranging for the baby boy to be killed she felt that the second part of the prophecy had been made irrelevant, so much so that she did not remark upon the complex complementarity of the two prophecies. Her frenzied outcry to her dead husband suggests that she has finally been made to recognize that his death, her second marriage, and the children resulting from it are all confirmations of the tri-partite prophecy they believed they had successfully negated. Her state of mind is thus the product not simply of the shocking discovery that she married her own son and murderer of her first husband, but that these events and her the birth of her subsequent children all occurred in perfect fulfillment of two separate prophecies. She who set out to defeat the god in all three points of her prophecy has now been compelled to recognize his victory. Not only has he vindicated his own prophetic word, he has contrived her punishment to make a perfect mockery of her belief that she could succeed and had long since already succeeded in preventing the god from making good on his pronouncements. Now she must have recognized that her own failure is a manifestation of the god’s power, and this has added to her sense of humiliation, powerlessness, defeat, and the utter failure of the philosophical skepticism on which she based her life. She and the audience can now trace her abysmal end to the sense of intellectual and moral self-sufficiency to which she so consistently and even proudly clung. [Md] [Apa] [Apc] [Mpea] [Mw]