Oidipous’s mention of his own name immediately following the reference to knowledge seems to invite play upon its one of its meanings—Oida pous did know the one thing that would enable him to answer the sphinx’s riddle. “Know-A-Foot” had knowledge of the ways in which men walk. This suggestion brings into view another of his name’s meanings: “Swell-foot,” which seems to refer to the injury done to his ankles when in infancy they were pierced and bound. His consequent awareness of human locomotion has been with him all his life. Thus, his facetious proclamation of ignorance pertains not only to the god’s manipulation of circumstances that enabled him to solve the sphinx’s riddle, and led thus to marriage with his mother, but also to the circumstances of his birth and rearing. Indeed, his name’s juxtaposition of these two periods in his life through the claim to knowledge and the reality of ignorance suggests that the god may have been involved in both. Oidipous’s ignorance pertains, then, not only to his own circumstances, capacities, and actions, but also to the god’s role in them. Thus, his sarcastic ridicule of his own ignorance reveals to the audience the fact that his actual ignorance for exceeds what he can imagine. His boast that he bested the sphinx through his knowledge of “the foot” makes a mockery of his own self confidence and suggests that even now his speech is under the god’s influence. His assumption that it is he who is in control of it appears to be an illusion, and this error opens him to a kind of confidence trick played upon him by the god in retribution for the arrogance expressed by his sarcasm. [Mpei] [Apaos] [Apamu] [Md]