The image likening marriage to a ship making a beach landing where no moorage is offered is ungainly, especially as a way to understand Oidipous’s arrival at Thebes, which lies inland. The audience may be used by now to Oidipous failing to grasp what is being said, but in this instance even it may feel it cannot fully appreciate the seer’s meaning. That the marriage to Iokaste was not proper is clear, as is the idea that Oidipous accepted the marriage simply because it came to him easily—perhaps too easily, if it was of the god’s devising. A good captain should see the dangers of placing the ship where it cannot be secured against storms and winds, such as the one that Teiresias seems to anticipate. The gale-force winds that are about to strike have the same origin, then, as the easy wind that brought Oidipous to the marriage. All, it would seem, is part of a divine plan. The choice of unmoored sailing ship as a metaphor for Oidipous’s return to his birthplace in land-locked Thebes remains, however, an irreducibly awkward element. On the other hand, Athens is intimately connected to its navy. This suggests an extension of the analogy. Just as Oidipous sailed into the awful union with his mother too easily and without due attention to the moorings, so Athens has allowed itself to be blown by following winds into a situation in which it can find no secure anchorage. Athens easily converted its naval success against the Persians into a hegemony that, while it has lasted, like Oidipous’s marriage, for quite some years, is proving an unholy alliance: no safe haven. Finally, and for similar reasons, like Oidipous Athens is having great difficulty hearing the words of the god pertaining to the unsavory relationships in which the city is currently living. Like Oidipous Athens has decided that its prophet is without legitimacy, and must therefore be ignored, and like Oidipous, Athens desires to hold fast to its tyrannical hegemony. [Gd] [Mpe] [Apaon] [Gt-a]