By “blights” Oidipous can only mean Laios’ death, but διαφθοράς literally means “corruptions” such as manifest themselves in the plague besetting Thebes (or Athens) or the contaminants that Oidipous brought with him when he arrived in Thebes as both regicide and parricide. So again, where Oidipous intends to gainsay Teiresias’s foresight, his own speech attributes to the seer knowledge of Oidipous’s hand in Laios’ death and Oidipous’s responsibility for the blights currently being visited on Thebes by the god. The wording yields an additional insight beyond even this, however, for the genitive suggests that the blights originate with Laios, whose disregard for prophecy polluted his family and his town. On this interpretation of Oidipous’s speech, he is right to insist that he should not be held responsible for Laios’ death, for in killing Laios he was an agent of justice; he was, just as he has claimed during the present action, acting for both the town and for Apollo. Clearly, however, he no more knew he was acting as an agent of the god and the city than he now knows that his words imply that that is so. Unlike Kreon, who has just declined to speak about what he claims not to understand, Oidipous’s speech reveals truths about which he has neither knowledge nor understanding. The difference between Oidipous and Kreon, then, is that while Kreon respects both Teiresias’s words and their source, as a result of which he restrains his own speech, Oidipous speaks in complete ignorance of the actual meaning and source of his words. This will show him to the audience to be no different than a puppet on the god’s hand. The audience sees Kreon and Teiresias both choosing to ally themselves with the god rather than with each other, as Oidipous supposes. Either they make themselves willing vehicles of the god’s message or else they keep silent in order not to obscure that message. [Apcma] Oidipous, meanwhile, has been made into an unwilling vehicle of the god’s message and an unwilling vehicle of the god’s action. [Apcmu] [Apamu]