When Kreon refers to the problem of Laios’s murder as τὸ πρὸς ποσὶν, by which he must mean “that which was right in front of us,” the audience may hear a reference to the riddle “pertaining to the feet” as well as an echo of the foot references bound up in Oidipous’s name. The former suggests that it was the riddle of the feet that distracted the city; the latter suggests that Oidipous himself, standing right in front of everyone, blocked their view, so to speak, of Laios’ murder. [Mpe] His very visibility in standing before the town as its savior seems paradoxically to have rendered him invisible as her polluter. Indeed, his presence raised no questions because by ridding the city of the Sphinx he appeared to have solved all its problems. [Mpea] Kreon’s words, then, are misleading, because it was not in fact the Sphinx that distracted Thebes from the investigation of Laios’s death but its eradication and the emergence of a new hero. [Mpew] So, where Kreon explains that the city was preoccupied with the sphinx’s riddle, double entendre in the reference to feet suggests that the riddle’s solution was bound up in the very name of the man now standing before it. [Gd] The sphinx’s riddle directs attention to feet. If his feet distinguish Oidipous from others, then, the present double entendre implies that in calling for a close look at the feet, the riddle was calling for all to look at and to properly see Oidipous. If it did so, it might have realized that Oidipous was the only man suited to find that “man” answered the riddle. The riddle was a lock to which Oidipous embodied the key. The riddle was made for him. The secret to his success, then, lies not in his intelligence, his head, but in the feet deformed by the events of his infancy and carried with him to manhood, when it served to make him Thebes’ ruler and the queen’s husband, and thus the source of the pollution with which Oidipous and the city must presently still deal. The supernatural sphinx seems to have been playing a role in a supernaturally orchestrated event. [Apaos] This suggests that a moment of great achievement (such as the Greeks’ over Persia) may distract a city and induce it to attribute its success to a single quality of its own. [Gt-a] Both Thebes’ previous anxieties and its relief when the sphinx is suddenly vanquished are so intense that it does not give due attention to the sacred obligation of finding and punishing Laios’ killer(s). [Md] [P]