Assuming the tone a mother might use to send quarreling brothers to their rooms to cool their tempers, Iokaste suggests that the brothers-in-law go to their separate homes. Iokaste’s maternalism is as unseemly as Oidipous’s earlier directed at priest and citizens. The inappropriateness of maternal language directed to husband and ruler is dwarfed, however, by the even greater unseemliness that she is also in fact his mother. Here the most private and intimate of relationships have civic implications. Problems in the one domain have implications for problems in the other, and the characterization κακthe horror is that d and rulerausing painn bringing pain as much as suffering it. ither of these facts touches Kreon. consultatiά suggests that these problems stem from either doing or not doing as the god instructs. Disobedience to the god has produced this monstrously conflated mother-son-husband-wife relationship. What began as the most intimate, personal, and private of acts has festered into city-wide contamination. [P] [Md] [Mg] [Mw]