According to the staffperson’s account, Oidipous commented that he “cursed himself” (ἠράσατο), by which he may have meant either that, having himself declared the penalty that he is now bound to carry out or having offended the gods, he called their wrath upon his own head. If he means the former, then he is improperly applying to a mortal action a term meant to pertain to divine action. If Oidipous curses himself, that would be impious and deserving divine punishment. If, on the other hand, he now understands that he has offended the gods, for which he understands his sufferings to be a just compensation, then he stands corrected and may even begin to redeem himself. The play has been promoting this distinction right from the opening tableau, when the priest and suppliants offered formal prayers to Apollo but then agreed that their prayer was answered by Oidipous’s appearance. Thebes has cursed itself by viewing and addressing Oidipous as if he were a god, while Oidipous has cursed himself by responding to the people’s prayerful summons as if he were in fact the god whose aid they sought. This problematic behavior can be traced even further back to Oidipous’s defeat of the Sphinx, for which feat both the town and Oidipous began to regard him as gifted with more-than-human intelligence. Now the audience can recognize that when Oidipous killed Laios, he was allowing his own impulses to take precedence over what the god had just told him; he was not, as he thought, acting independently of the god, but in consequence of his direct resistance to the god, and this meant that the god was subordinating Oidipous’s impulse to a higher purpose. Thus, where Oidipous thought to obliterate the god’s directive by over-writing it, in so thinking he cursed himself; he caused the god to act against him. It was clearly not the action of killing his father that cursed him, as is made clear by the fact that the god ordered him to perform it, but the attitude with which the action was performed: resistance rather than compliance. Laios’ killing demonstrates that one does not act in harmony with the god either by chance or the independent application of one’s own judgment; one acts in harmony with the god by seeking the god’s guidance and then following that guidance as closely as possible. This applies to cities as well as to individuals. Thebes supposes that Oidipous might have had a god’s aid (l. 38), but the audience has come to realize that the god’s involvement in the matter realized the prophecy from which Oidipous was running; that he should marry his mother. The city wrongly inferred from Oidipous’s success that he was blessed, and this error led to the further error of licensing the city to put its faith in the blessed man rather than in the gods who must have blessed him. Had Oidipous arrived at Thebes having cooperated with Apollo by sacrificing his father’s life to the god and intending to follow the god’s instructions with regard to his mother (he never inquired further, what precisely they were), his defeat of the Sphinx would have manifested the god’s blessings. Had the city taken Oidipous’s success as a sign of the god’s blessing for its having sent an embassy to consult Delphi about the Sphinx, Oidipous’s return would have been a blessing indeed; there would have been no cause for the god to visit a plague upon it. The same event can prove to be either blessing or curse, depending upon the city’s relationship with its gods. [Aj] [P]