Oidipous gives as the reason for his request to be permitted to live on Kithairon that he die and be buried where his parents had planned. He seems thus to express again the wish that he had never been saved, or perhaps he means to lay the blame for his wretched end at his parents’ feet. As he uses the same terminology in reference to his own burial that he used just moments ago (ll. 1447-8) in reference to his mother’s, the audience will juxtapose his death with Iokaste’s suicide and find that, just as the son’s miseries have the same source as those of mother, namely: resistance to the god’s instructive speech, mother and son are also alike in taking charge of their own deaths. This is another instance in which they disrespect the boundaries between mortal and immortal, for it is a divine prerogative to spin mortals’ fates. [P] [Ap] In blaming his parents, Oidipous misses the similarity between them, and while there is truth in the charge that Laios and Iokaste bear a great deal of responsibility for the events of his life, this overlooks Apollo’s even more powerful role. It also overlooks his own opportunity to cooperate in Apollo’s effort to punish their disobedience and overcome their efforts to nullify the divinely sanctioned consequences. [Dnc] Thus, instead of helping the god to lay to rest the episode of impiety, his refusal even to hear the god out, far more than his parents’ actions, led to the parricide and incest that have ruined his life and led both to his self-blinding and now to his wish to be allowed to die alone on Kithairon. [Mip] [Mw] He has just today been informed that his parents acted from fear of a prophecy, but he seems to make no connection between their fear and his own, between the destructiveness of their actions and his. Recognizing what he does not, however, the Athenian audience will be prompted to draw the parallel to its own fear of prophecy and consider that this fear is similarly leading it to behave in such a way as to necessitate divine action ending in burials that the city will arrange for itself. [Gt-a] [Md] From this perspective Athens may regard its own battlefield fatalities as its own form of self-made burial in the wilderness. [Mw]