Kreon’s description of the Sphinx’s song as ποικίλος (“embroidered,” “colorful,” “ornate”) suggests that it was like a colorful embroidery. The surface of her song, the riddle, was so dazzling and distracting that it caused the city to look away from its duty to pursue the king’s killers. Mention of the riddle will, however, have reminded the audience that Oidipous solved it very soon after Laios’ death. Thus, if the town was distracted by the Sphinx and the constant threat she posed, her removal, rather than freeing the town from its distraction, replaced it with a new distraction in the form of an extraordinarily adept stranger, whom it embraced as a substitute for the murdered king by anointing him tyrannos and marrying him to the freshly widowed queen, a story that Kreon’s excuse papers over. His excuse is itself, then, a colorfully embroidered surface. It hides the truth that the town, rather than feeling injured by the loss of its king, seems to have felt itself improved by it, for where Laios was unable to rid the town of its supernatural menace without having to turn to Delphi for help, Oidipous managed the feat without any delay and without any apparent difficulty. From this realization the audience might further infer that the dictates of piety are only important to Thebes in times of dire need. Indeed, if the audience extends this insight, it will see that it also applies to Laios, for having seen fit to ignore the prophecies constraining him to avoid intercourse with his wife, his undertaking a personal journey to Delphi displays the same inconsistency. Both Thebes and its rulers, including Kreon, seem to adhere to the dictates of piety only when it suits them. When it does not, they ignore the dictates of piety with the excuse that they are distracted by prophecy’s dazzling intricacy. [Md] [Mpew] [P]
This perspective might strike a chord with the audience’s own ambivalence towards Delphi and its peference to rely upon the capacities of its ruler rather than turning to a god to direct the solution of civic problems, including plague. Kreon’s characterization of the Sphinx as a singer of distracting riddles would have seemed to the Athenian audience akin to its own view of Delphi, to which Athens responded in a manner comparable to Thebes’ befuddled inaction in response to the Sphinx. Athens may have responded to the the twin crises of plague and war associated with the perplexing prophecy given Sparta by setting aside its own sacred obligation to consult Delphi for guidance. Rather than taking the customary steps to disambiguate Delphi’s intricate (ποικίλος) speech, Athens was allowing itself to be distracted by the prophecy’s obvious hostility. [Gt-a] [Mipd]
The Sphinx is comparable to Delphi in other ways as well. Just as solution of the Sphinx’s riddle requires an understanding of what it means to be human in terms of one’s mobility and age, one’s strengths and weaknesses, the famous dictum above the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi admonishes the consulter to “know thyself.” The monster’s riddling song requiring knowledge of what it means to be human appears in some sense to be a variation on the Oracle’s admonition, with the difference that instead of having a fixed place to which consulters travel to be instructed to know themselves, the Sphinx takes its insistence upon self-knowledge on the road. Where the Oracle requires that people go to great lengths to obtain a consultation with the god, the Sphinx brings divine speech to those who might decline to approach the god. Once it considers the Sphinx’s riddle to be a version of the Delphic dictum to know oneself, the audience may come to understand that the Sphinx is not simply the monster for which the Thebans take her; her presence ties the well-being of the city and all those who live within it to a philosophical, theological, and typological understanding of what it means to be human. This is a lesson the Thebans seem not yet to have taken to heart, because to Kreon the problem she presented was immediate and practical. It is ironic that Kreon should still be making of her visitation an excuse for divorcing concerns about sacred duty (the search for Laios’ killer) from practical issues (lifting the Sphinx’s siege). As a consequences of Thebes’ failure to disambiguate the Sphinx’s language the city is again experiencing terrible problems of a supernatural nature. This should demonstrate that mortal wellbeing cannot be dissociated from the proper understanding of mortal capacities and limitations. The daemonic messenger implicitly warns that the destruction of people and cities awaits those who look to the immediately practical problems “before their feet” rather than looking at the feet themselves for an indication of mortal strengths and weaknesses, vision and blindness, and hence mortals’ need to seek all the help they can get, especially divine guidance, because they are not free to stop taking the steps that write their destiny. [Mpea] [Mw]
The reason that Kreon gives for dropping the murder investigation reveals the extent to which he and the town proceeded not by principles of justice and piety, but rather expedience. Recognizing this, the audience can see that when it leads to the neglect of sacred obligations, expedience can produce an error for which a dire consequence, such as plague or military defeat, can be expected. Such consequences need not be the end of the story, however, if they serve as provocations to consult the Oracle. [Mi]