The mention of misbirthings prompts the audience to make another connection between the misbegotten children of Oidipous’s incestuous marriage and the fertility troubles of a citizenry that he has come to regard as his own “children” (line 1). The audience has already sensed that calling his subjects children contaminates them; now his legendary incest connects him with the reproductive malaise from which the town suffers. Awareness of the incest and the prophecy that foretells it can only throw Oidipous’s ignorance into sharper relief for the audience. [Mpei] At the same time, its exploration of the parallels and connections between the two allusions to children attunes it ever more to the possible connections between Oidipous’s fate and that of the city over which he rules. In this process the audience acquires a perspicacity superior to that of anyone now on stage, including the man renowned for his insight into the human condition. From its present perspective, his vaunted gifts seem strikingly inadequate, not so much because he misses the subtle and rather tenuous connection between the long-ago prophecy (known to him and presumably also to the audience) of an incestuous marriage and the way in which the present plague manifests itself as a blight on reproduction, but because he appears despite his declaration of willingness to help the city to be implicated in its contamination. [Mw] [Gm]