The Chorus speaks now in a series of images that include warfare: military expedition and hand-to-hand combat, farming: agricultural fields lying barren, family life: fruitless labor pains, public ritual: a flame upon a funereal altar at a temple on a west-facing promontory such as Sounion or Delphi, and nature possibly combined with divine signs: birds in flight. These images and contexts are tumbled together in a blend of metaphor and reality. Expedition, defense, and funeral pyres do not fit well to the Theban context; the Chorus must mean them metaphorically. They do, however, fit directly to the Athenian reality. What is literal in the one city is metaphorical in the other, and vice versa. This chiasmus becomes richly suggestive in a word such as ἀκτὰν, which means both “promontory,” as the cliff edge above the sea, and the edge of the altar to Hades (the “western” god), so that one word multiplies referentiality in a series of parallel but not necessarily equivalent images and associations: flames consume the dead in both Thebes and Athens, offerings are made to the gods at altars throughout both Thebes and Athens, and altars are bathed in hues of red at sacred precincts open to all Greek cities. The juxtaposition of reality and metaphor blends the cities–one mythical, the other actual–and ties them both to places such as Delphi, a site of both actual and mythical religious activity. This superimposition results in a blurring of distinctions between Athens and Thebes and between myth and reality. [Gt-a] [D]