Calling for punishment for failure to carry out “these things,” Oidipous presumably means assistance in bringing Laios’ killer(s) to justice, but his words echo his earlier proclamation, when he pointed to himself as the one who shall “do it all” (line 145), by which he meant save the city, but was understood by the audience to mean kill my father and sleep with my mother. This confuses the plague that Oidipous would have befall an uncooperative Thebes with the plague already befalling a Thebes that must be supposed already either to have done something terrible or failed to do something of great importance. If the punishment already being meted out is in fact for some such omission, the audience can infer that the god holds punishable the omission of any act of piety for which the city as a whole is responsible. Yet how can a city (such as Thebes) avoid giving such offense, unless by seeking out the god’s instruction at the earliest opportunity and accepting no substitute for it? Thebes’ fault, for which the plague must be the punishment, lies in not having approached the god soon enough, presumably because it has been content, as it was earlier in this play’s action, to accept the substitution of a mortal for a divine savior. The Athenian plague may be interpreted similarly as a failure to have approached the god in due season. As in Thebes, the plague in Athens punishes, but in Thebes it has also eventually compelled the city to do that which it should have known to do earlier: consult. Athens, by contrast, has not yet consulted. Thus, the god’s justice is not simply punitive; it is corrective. [Aj] [Apa]