It may take some time for Oidipous to pass out through the palace doors and onto the stage. How he moves, or is moved, is unclear; he may emerge alone or with attendants, supported or unsupported. However he emerges, the audience will see a breathtaking physical change in him; the mask he wears clearly shows the eye sockets blood-gored and empty. If he came on his own feet, leaning upon and perhaps tapping his way with his staff, this would reaffirm his oft-demonstrated determination to act under his own power and according to his own judgment. If he walks alone he will need a stick to feel his way, and this new use for his staff provides the audience with numerous connections and implications to explore. The staff could even be one that he has had with him throughout the play. It may be styled as a walking stick or, better, a scepter upon which he puts some of his weight. In the time it takes for him to come out onto the stage and as the Chorus verbalizes its initial response to the sight of him, the audience has a moment to assess the meaning of these changes in his appearance, to connect the staff in his hand with the murder weapon and his ascent to poltical power, and to recall that the Sphinx’s riddle was answered in part with the image of a man walking with the aid of a stick. Oidipous’s slow progress would suggest that he has reached the final stage of life, and thus it may occur to the spectators that the Sphinx’s riddle is proving prophetic, although not as he foresaw it, for it is not the infirmities of age that compel him to use his cane in this way, but rather the injurious actions, both of his parents in the distant past and those he himself has just performed, all expressing themselves in relation to the cane. So, where Oidipous was able to answer the Sphinx’s riddle based upon his ability to define “man,” his own example proves this definition false; resistance to the god’s prophecy can lame mortals at any stage of life. The course of life is not a given; it is something over which men have control, for if their actions follow from impious attitudes, they lame or limit themselves, while cities bring upon themselves the wider-spread devastations of war and disease. [P] [Mw]