Use of the word πάλαι prompts the audience’s thoughts to wander back in time to evaluate the quality of happiness during the many years in which Oidipous, his wife, and children lived in ignorance of the shocking truth, thence continuing even further back to the consultation at Delphi and Oidipous’s anguished response to it, and then back to the even more distant past in which Oidipous was a victim of his parents’ wish to have him killed, back to the pleasure they took in sexual intercourse proscribed by the god, and back even to Kadmos and the unhappy events surrounding Thebes’ foundation. From this perspective any happiness recently experienced by Oidipous, his wife, his children, and his city was illusory and unstable. The only meaningful and durable joy, the audience may now realize, must be based in well established harmonious relations between men and gods. [Mw] [Mpei] [Dnc]