Oidipous’s rhetorical question echoes a word used by the priest (ἐκδιδαχθείς at l. 38) when he expressed the supposition that where Oidipous’s solution of the Sphinx’s riddle might have been based on aid either from the townspeople or a god, it in fact came directly from Oidipous’s unaided mind. As it obviates the need for divine direction through the medium of prophecy, the town’s faith in the superiority of Oidipous’s intellect shows it to be contaminated by the same beliefs and attitudes that infect him. It is of this pollution that the god, speaking through his Oracle at Delphi, instructs the town to rid itself.
Inquiring by whom Teiresias is instructed, Oidipous prompts the audience to respond: by the god. That he poses this question indicates, however, that he takes Teiresias’s statement to be false and that he does not even consider that it might come from the god. This error reveals that he judges what comes from the god based upon what he himself believes to be true; he makes his own understanding the arbiter of every statement’s validity. If the god should attempt to communicate something that lies beyond Oidipous’s ken or that affronts his reason, Oidipous will reject it. The only use he has for prophecy is to support what he already believes and is capable of understanding. This attitude makes of the god a servant of Oidipous’s needs. That Teiresias and the Oracle have both been at pains to emphasize the source of the town’s pollution suggests that Oidipous’s negative influence resides in the communication of his faith in himself as the arbiter of truth. [Mip] [Apcma] [Gd] [Mpea] [Md]