Oidipous manages to blubber in fragmentary sentences the most cogent of paradoxes: Iokaste is both his wife and not his wife. He seems to have comprehended the truth of his situation and yet to be unable fully to grasp what he comprehends. He is at the same time lucid and deranged. His physical movements express the same paradoxically uncomprehending comprehension. He seems mentally and physically crippled. This may prompt the audience to recall the fact of his maiming and suggest a connection between what happened to him as an infant and what has happened to him now. In the first instance he was crippled by his parents’ efforts to end his life in order to end prophecy’s threat to Laios, but the infant was saved and sufficiently healed eventually to “wander” (as he is said to do again now) to that place where, using the staff that he may still have needed to overcome the effects of his childhood maiming, he fulfilled the prophecy in fear of which his parents had him maimed and attempted to have him killed. Thus was the god’s word redeemed. Now he has learned that he himself has again and again been made to redeem the god’s prophetic word even when it ran altogether counter to his own wishes and despite his efforts to prevent it. This has sent him reeling. Where once Apollo healed Oidipous to allow him to punish Laios’ disobedience, now he has destroyed Oidipous’s restored vigor in punishment for his unwillingness to serve as required. The god is capable of healing the maimed or maiming the healthy as required by justice, which is defined as willing cooperation with necessity as communicated to mortals by their god. [Mp] [Md] [Ap] [Aj] [Dnc]