Oidipous seems to find birth to be a criterion by which claims to knowledge and power can be adjudicated. Yet, given the fact that Oidipous does not know the truth about his own birth, this claim is strange. The audience, on the other hand, knows that Oidipous and Kreon are all too closely related by birth, and if either of them is “bad” by birth, it would seem to be Oidipous, whose birth itself was bad because it resulted from his father’s disregard for Apollo’s explicit communication with him to forego intercourse with his wife. Oidipous could, then, through his own birth, be described as κακός—the word to which the audience has been sensitized ever since Oidipous insisted that he would be κακός not to do whatever the god instructed (l. 76). If Oidipous is by birth κακός it is because his father did what the god instructed him not to do. But the audience might not accept that a person can be made noble or base by birth. If Oidipous was not made bad through birth, he has become bad, which must mean that he has either done what the god instructed him not to do or failed to do what the god instructed him to do. What, then, has Apollo either enjoined him to do or not to do? The audience knows only of the prophecy that he murder his father and marry his mother, both of which deeds he has done. How, then, can he be “bad?” [Mpea] [Aj]