The audience may find “brought by or bringing an ill wind” (δυσούριστον) to be a good description of Oidipous’s lifelong blindness, the dark cloud from which he has been in perpetual recoil, with the result that he has allowed himself and his city to be blown far off course, but these words seem only to reaffirm his attribution of his misfortunes to indiscriminate natural forces. This view makes of his self-blinding yet another misguided attempt at self-assertion that denies the gods the recognition that is their due. Oidipous continues to cling to his lifelong blindness, just as he proclaimed he would when stabbing his eyes out, expressing his intent to see “in darkness” (i.e., not to see at all) the children whom he ought not to have had and not to recognize the parents, now dead, whom in life he should have recognized, had he attended more thoughtfully to the Oracle’s responses to his questions about their identity. It would seem that even now, struck down by Apollo’s hand, he persists in his refusal to see that all his family’s improper relations stem from their own improper responses to prophecy. Oidipous remains in an insuperable intellectual darkness added to which the physical darkness wrought by his self-blinding only reveals the stubbornness of his refusal to acknowledge the improper relationships in which he has lived; those touching father, mother, children, all of which stem from his and their relations to the god Apollo. For the audience this makes his suffering the more terrible, because not only must he bear the consequences of all his errors, both those prophesied by the god and those issued by his own edict, but his persisting self-made intellectual blindness challenges Apollo to continue the effort to bring him to his senses by subjecting him to further pain. Apollo’s project is beginning to seem to be hopeless; this mortal, and with him possibly both family and city, is beyond Apollo’s power to reach. If so, Apollo must know it, in which case he is staging all this suffering for the benefit of another audience: the people of Athens. From this perspective it makes sense that Oidipous neither be put to death nor allowed to die, for Apollo’s goal is not to eliminate him, but to put his errors on vivid display “for all mankind” to see and learn from. The god’s harsh treatment is not, then, primarily punitive; it is instructive. This raises the question for the Athenian audience, whether it will prove as obdurate as Oidipous or more quickly accept the god’s instruction and so remove from him the pressure of subjecting it to ever more forceful instruction. [Dnc] [Dnp] [Apc] [Md] [Mpe] [Gt-a] Athens’ endeavor to learn from Oidipous’s suffering may begin, then, with its interpretation of the word δυσούριστον, for clearly none of the events bearing upon Oidipous, the royal family, and the city of Thebes was brought by a simple “ill wind.” All of this play’s “winds,” whether the one that enabled Oidipous’s sailing into and sailing out from the “great harbor” of his mother’s body or the gust of air that Oidipous just felt passing through his body (ll. 1309-10), bear the marks of divine conception and execution. Once it senses that these winds are blown by Apollo, the audience will find it difficult not to withdraw from Oidipous’s judgment of them as “ill,” for to consider them so is to disregard the god from whose perspective all these interventions were necessary and intended to be of help to mortals. [Ad] [Apaon] Whether this benefit is realized depends entirely upon the way each message is received and each intervention understood. [Mipd] If it is not properly understood, painful interventions can be expected to keep coming. Now that Thebes’ polluter has been identified and awaits punishment, for example, the city can expect a release from plague. The myth suggests, however, that Thebes’ troubles are not yet over; they are to be renewed in full strength in a war brought upon the city by Oidipous’s sons. The city will not have purged itself of pollution. Just so, where early in the play the Chorus prayed for a fair wind to blow Ares, or war, away from the town (l. 194), now, when it has been made apparent that Apollo has been working to bring about Oidipous’s destruction, the audience may suppose that the god will not fail to notice and react to the way in which the town responds. [Aj]] [P] This raises questions about the audience’s present judgment of Athens, to which war came accompanied both by plague and the fear that Apollo was aiding Athens’ enemies. The example of Thebes suggests that, even if the Athens were to be purged (perhaps by plague) of those responsible for advocating its impious course of action, this will not necessarily free the city of its ills. Removal of the plague of ills depends upon the city’s reverent submission to the god of plague and prophecy for instruction, what it must do. [Mip]