“Such a man am I,” declares Oidipous, as if indicating to the audience that he recognizes himself to be the killer who offended the god and whose presence has consequently contaminated the city. In fact, he means the opposite: “ally both to god and victim.” Where he sees himself as the victim’s ally, the audience knows him to be the one who took the victim’s life, and where he sees himself as the god’s ally, the audience may suspect him to be rather the god’s antagonist. Indeed, where he now insists upon doing “everything” that the god instructs, he in fact once did everything he could to avoid doing what the god told him he should do. In both his words and deeds he has been at odds with Apollo, despite which, strangely, by some divinely worked inversion, he has fulfilled the god’s first prophecy to him and now seems, despite his own ignorance, to be in the process of revealing himself to himself as well as to all mankind. [Apcmu] [Apamu] [Mpei]