As the Chorus expresses its certainty that Oidipous will not incur the charge of “ignominy” (κακία), the audience knows that this is impossible; the myth guarantees that Oidipous will suffer ill repute. Thus, the Chorus places itself squarely in the wrong and underscores its ignorance, the baselessness of its own ability to predict the future, the falsity of the assumption underlying its skepticism towards prophecy, and the damage wrought by this error. [Mpea] The word κακία echoes moreover Oidipous’s earlier claim that he would be κακός (meaning almost anything from “remiss” to “impious”) not doing whatever the god might “make clear” (ll. 76-7), [P] which in turn recalls the “unclear” (ἀδήλων) deaths mentioned at the end of the previous strophe (l. 497). The Chorus was wrong there too; the death of Laios, at least, had been clearly prophesied, and it resulted from his doing what the god had made clear to him not to do. [Mi] [Md] The Chorus is unlike Laios and Oidipous, both of whom knowingly and even deliberately act against the god’s instructive word; it seems simply to be ignorant. [Mpei] Its error, however, contaminates it with the fault of the Labdacids whom it consciously serves and supports, and so threatens to bring it, like them, into ill repute, to incur the charge of baseness, and to be made, like Laios and Oidipous, to suffer or die. Insofar as Athens shares the Thebans’ skepticism towards prophecy, it can expect to suffer the consequences of its own resulting ignorance and the baseness (κακία) of its attitude towards the god. [Mw] [Mg]