The priest’s words imply that in ridding Thebes of the Sphinx, Oidipous was an instrument, or even author, of fate. Yet the adjective αἴσιος (“auspicious”) derives from the noun αἶσα, meaning “decree, dispensation of a god.” The implication, then, is that the Sphinx, depicted on Attic vases as winged (here: “bird”), is a divine creature delivering a potentially or even presumably fateful message. Thus, the image of Oidipous handing its a divine messenger and instrument of fate its own fate is confused. Oidipous’s victory suggests that he was in fact superior to the daemonic Sphinx. An obvious distinction between them is that Oidipous works from his own intellect while birds (ὄρνιθι αἰσίῳ) may be a medium for divine communication with mortals through the additional assistance of mantics or prophets. In obliquely referring to the Sphinx as an “auspicious bird” the priest’s words suggest that Oidipous is a mantis who reads its message. As riddle-solver Oidipous seems rightly to have read the message delivered by the Sphinx and so to have displayed the special abilities of a bird-augur. The riddle he solved does not, however, appear to have been carrying a fateful message from the gods; rather, it seems to convey a commonplace observation about the human life cycle. Yet this life cycle is a direct marker of the distinction between mortals, who are subject to growth and decay, and immortals, who are not. If this distinction was the content of the message borne by the Sphinx, then Oidipous’s unaided defeat of the Sphinx seems to blur it. In fact, neither he nor the townspeople have been drawing any meaningful distinction between gods and men. The association with augury might, moreover, remind the Athenian audience of the ill-omened double prophecy central to the legends about the house of Kadmos—to Laios that he will be killed by a son born to him and to Oidipous that he will kill his father and marry his mother. So that even as Oidipous is celebrated as something of a bird-augur, his oblivion to the relationship between prophecy and his own life story casts a dark shadow of doubt over his possession of any capacity whatsoever in regard to the interpretation of divine messages, whether encoded in the behavior of birds, delivered as enigmatic speech by bird-like creatures of divine or semi-divine origin, or given voice by the Pythian priestess at the Oracle at Delphi. The present state of affairs is in fact misleading, for Oidipous is about to suffer the discovery that he is not nearly as prescient as he and the Thebans think. Thus, while the priest lauds Oidipous, his words introduce a strong caution. The audience may now question both his view that Oidipous delivered to the fateful augur its fate and the assumptions on which that view is based, for rather than seeing bird or Sphinx as a divine agent carrying communication from gods to mortals, he (like Oidipous) believes that a mortal can delivere a fateful end to a god’s agent. There is, then, a clear distinction to be made between those who think they can interpret “signs” by using common sense based on everyday experience, those who speak prophetic truths without meaning to, and those, such as the Oracle at Delphi, who are authorized to speak for the gods and make useful revelations. [Mpe] [Mip] [Apcma] [Apcmu]