Oidipous misquotes the Oracle, for where Kreon informed him that the god ordered that Laios’ killer suffer death or banishment, Oidipous now reduces the alternative to a single action: “to kill.” This error refutes his own argument that the god’s will is already known. Indeed, his recasting of the god’s speech follows a pattern that the audience has been learning to recognize throughout the course of this play; he does not pay close attention to the god’s language, but rather construes it in keeping with his own preferences, his own expectations, his own judgments, and his own decisions. Here, however, his own speech demonstrates the absence of that clarity which he finds the situation to demand. This observation should prompt the Athenian audience to question whether it might not similarly be misconstruing the god’s speech. [Gt-a] It might now realize that it interprets the prophecy given the Spartans in the same way that Oidipous interprets the prophecy regarding his father—as prediction rather than instruction. Consequently, just as Oidipous’s error necessitated the god to subject him to the terrible deeds he wrongly understood the god to mean, so Athens’ error can be expected to be necessitating Apollo to subject it to the terrible outcome it understands him to have set forth–defeat at the hands of the Spartans. Viewing its circumstances from the perspective afforded it by Oidipous’s example, the audience may consider that the promise of a Spartan victory is predicated in part upon its own misconstrual of the prophecy, for understanding the god to have promised a Spartan victory puts the god in the position of having to ensure that victory. [Dn] The only way out of this conundrum is to seek the god’s precision. [Mipd]