Given the attention to the concept of misdeed throughout the play, the “ills” (κακά) by which the staffperson probably means only the visible gore from the self-blinding and the corpse from the suicide, will seem to the audience to refer also, and even more significantly, to the horrors to which the act of self-blinding and suicide are reflexes: the parricide and incest to be sure, but even more disturbing, son and mother’s doomed efforts to assert their own wills over prophecies they find intolerable and the contradictions in which these efforts catch them, for as Oidipous put it very early on in this play, he would be κακός not to do everything that the god made clear (l. 76). Now it is clear that he is suffering because he has done everything and more directed by the god, for he was sometimes willing to do what the god laid out for him to do, but not always. He fulfilled both what he willingly undertook to perform and what he undertook to avoid. Oidipous set himself up as the final arbiter of his own actions, and in so doing he set himself against the god. His independence of judgment and action meant everything to him as it had to his parents, and it is this that the god has been at pains to correct. [Aj] [Ad] Thus, where the staffperson means to say that the ills literally “broke forth” from Oidipous’s eyes to bespatter both their heads, the audience will understand that everything untoward broke forth from the members of this family. These two are made jointly responsible for the κακά breaking forth from their own shameful deeds and especially from their impious attitudes towards the god. The κακά that burst from them spilled out onto them and covered them, but also bespattered everyone around them, visiting a plague upon their city. The ills that bespatter individuals and cities stem from their own ill-conceived insistence upon autonomy. [Mw] [Md] [Mg]