That Oidipous mentions himself twice as the bearer of the sufferings “mine, these my sufferings” indicates that he is focused primarily on his own experience, for which he blames the god, forgetting the city, his mother-wife, and his children. This refutes what he said at the play’s opening, when he was not suffering any personal grief, yet claimed to suffer more than all: “all are ill, and being ill, there is not / One of you as ill as I” (ll. 61-2). His personal pain is limiting his vision; his mental darkness not only persists, but grows deeper. Thus, while he rightly sees Apollo’s hand in the many misfortunes that he is being made to suffer, he appears to be so caught up in feeling pity for himself that he fails even momentarily to consider that Apollo might have had good grounds for subjecting him to them. For that impiety he merits the god’s corrective attention. His present state of his mind has changed little in quality from that which provoked the god in the first place. He holds the god to be neither just nor good. He continues to scorn him, as he turned his back on him at Delphi. This attitude will appear to the audience, however, to justify not only the sufferings Apollo has arranged for him up to the present moment, but to give him good reason to subject him to further suffering in the future. It would infer that one is wrong to blame the gods even for the misfortunes of which they seem clearly to be the authors. [Md] [Mpea] [P] [Aj] [Apa] [Mip]