Naming Laios by his ancestry, Oidipous reminds the audience of his own forebears. Invoking the victim’s ancestors, he invokes those of the murderer, an ambiguity that may be understood by the audience in terms of the myth of Kadmos at the origins of the family lineage. Thebes’ foundation story has Kadmos preparing to sacrifice a cow at the place where the town was to be settled, an event that reflected Kadmos’s decision to call off the search for his sister Europa, who had been abducted by Zeus in the guise of a bull. The mating of this bull with the girl Europa suggests her identity as a cow, and so Kadmos’s intention to sacrifice a cow seems problematic. Indeed, the nature of this conflict is characteristic of the myth, for Kadmos had sought instructions from the Oracle at Delphi, who told him to find a peculiarly marked cow and found a city wherever it paused to rest. Thus, the accurate interpretation of divine instructions and the scrupulousness with which they are followed constitute a key mythic element down through the generations to Laios and Oidipous. Another complicating event diverts Kadmos from his initial task and delays its completion. In this case the complication is a dragon guarding the water needed by Kadmos for the cow’s proper sacrifice. Kadmos kills the dragon and, following Athena’s advice (another instance of divine instruction), sows half its teeth in the ground, from which emerge armed men who set to fighting one another. Of these only five survive, and they become the founders of Thebes’ leading families. The danger that Kadmos slay his sister is thus displaced into the generation of the “sons” he sows, and they immediately set to killing each other. Several generations later, Laios becomes responsible for the rape of Chrysippus, son of his host Pelops, for which deed he is cursed—or rather, his action prompts the renewal of a curse already working its way through several generations of the family. Laios returns to Thebes and marries Iokaste, with whom he is, however, forbidden (in another instance of divine instruction) by the god to have intercourse. His failure to abide by the prohibition leads to his ordering the infant he conceives to be bound at the ankles and exposed in the wilds. Attempted infanticide and the grown baby’s subsequent parricide replace the fratricides of earlier generations. When he invokes this genealogy, then, Oidipous seems also to invoke its persistent problems. His ignorance of the family history seems, if anything, to be a contributing factor in the curse’s further propagation. The audience, however, knowing the genealogy to be his, and knowing also that he has killed his father in connection with instructions from the same Oracle that directed Kadmos, will respond to his genealogy with the realization that he is caught up in a pattern far beyond his own powers of comprehension. This pattern links lethal familial interactions, divine instruction, and the town’s wellbeing from the moment of Thebes’ foundation right down to the events presently being enacted on stage. [Gm] [Mpei] [Mi] [Mw]