When Oidipous asks Kreon to nod in assent (ξύννευσον) and to touch him with his hand, he asks for the gestures that Thetis obtained from Zeus (Iliad 1) and that she used to comfort and reassure her son Achilleus. Oidipous thus transposes the gestural language for communication between god and mortal onto a relationship between ruler and ruled as he did at the beginning of the play when he answered the prayers of the suppliants at the altar before the door to his residence. In contrast to the suppliants, who began their supplication hoping for a god’s response, Oidipous implicitly confers upon Kreon the powers of divinity. This raises the question, will Kreon accept to be thus addressed, thereby indicating his satisfaction with himself as a god’s replacement, or will he rebuff it as improper? Where at the play’s opening the audience had itself been inclined to welcome Oidipous’s emergence as an appropriate and timely response to the people’s prayer, it should now have little reason to wish Kreon to assume the mantle of divine authority. Indeed, from its present perspective, the audience will look back critically on its enthusiasm for a mortal solution to the plague. It can now see that neither of the alternatives laid before it then was an appropriate response to the civic crisis, for while it was wrong for a man to stand in for Apollo, the god was almost certainly never going to come forth onto the stage in his own person. The play has presented a mountain of evidence that, while Apollo has the means to speak to mortals through the ambiguity of their language and to affect their circumstances through chance, nature (such as plague and storm), and supernatural beings (such as the sphinx), he cannot or will not enter the mortal world bodily. [Dnp] [Dnc] [Dp] [Dc] Supplication is therefore insufficient as a stand-alone approach, for it asks for a miracle without offering to contribute the cooperation that may be necessary to its own deliverance. The choice for mortals lies between willing and unwilling cooperation with the god. The former is certain to be the most efficient and least onerous, and there is but one way to adopt it: consultation at Delphi with all this entails. [P] [Mpea] [Mpei] [Mipd] [Apc] [Apa]