Asking his daughters where they are, Oidipous indicates that he now literally cannot see with whom he is living, as Teiresias earlier meant figuratively (ll. 338, 366-7, and 412-14), which suggests that Oidipous may also have been the agent of his figurative blindness. Looking back both to Teiresias’s revelations and to those of the god at Delphi years before, the audience will understand that Oidipous on both occasions closed his mind to what the god’s mediums communicated to him. His failure to credit the insights of Oracle and seer amounted to mental self-blinding that resulted in misdeeds so horrific to look upon that they led to physical self-blinding. It is ironic that the misdeeds do not have a physical aspect; the ocular self-blinding can do nothing to dim his knowledge of what he has done. It can only acknowledge the harm of his self-constructed blindness to prophecy. [Mip] [Mpea] [Mw]