Given the god’s mention of necessity when Oidipous was consulting about his parents and the audience’s realization of its significance to the prophetic message he was given (m854.2), Kreon’s use of the same word here is striking and prompts a comparison of the two situations. At Delphi Oidipous was oblivious to Apollo’s endeavor to communicate to him a necessity to which the god himself was subject. Now Kreon presumes that Oidipous is trying to communicate a necessity to which he and Kreon are subject. Yet the audience must find this unlikely; Oidipous rarely acknowledges any necessity to which he must bow even when he hears it from the Oracle. (The exception is his acceptance of the necessity of bringing Laios’ killer to justice.) Why should Kreon suppose that Oidipous is now able to see a necessity for himself? The verb that Kreon chooses is also odd: τυχεῖν carries the connotation of occurrence by chance. Bowing to necessity is very different than according with it by chance. It is not like Kreon to be facetious and he has just promised not to mock Oidipous, but this line, with its projection onto Oidipous of prophetic insight and its suggestion that Kreon will not accord with necessity willingly but only by chance seems ironically to reverse the characters of the two men. In fact, their situations are now reversed: Kreon is the ruler and Oidipous his subject. Kreon seems to anticipate that the request Oidipous is about to make will have the force of an order, having even the wording of a divine instruction communicating the necessity of compliance. So, if Kreon agrees to hear Oidipous’s request, perhaps only out of compassion, he has made it clear that he is not deceived by the politeness and apparent humility with which the request is made. Kreon is exercizing the utmost sensitivity in walking a fine line between implicit rebuke (should he decline even to hear Oidipous’s request), and yielding to the temptation, now that he is acting as Thebes’ ruler, of regarding himself as more than human by entertaining requests that should properly by directed to a god. [Md] [Mg] [Dn]