Echoing the adverb ἀθέως used by Oidipous to describe the city’s suffering from plague at l. 254, the adjective ἄθεος suggests here that Thebes is in fact already dying “godlessly”—the city no longer enjoys the full protection that its gods might afford it. The suggestion that it is living and dying godlessly underscores the moral ambiguity in the town’s swearing oaths to excuse its own failure to think consequentially. That it still thinks to live under the gods’ protection suggests an improper desire to shelter behind the gods’ protections and so to leave even problems of ethical thought and action for the gods to resolve. The coupling of “friendless” with “godless” further implies that the people see their gods as friends. Yet friendship is not a relationship of one-way dependence; it is a balanced partnership benefitting both parties. Given the audience’s present negative judgment of Thebes’ propensity to evoke the gods as a substitute for the expenditure of effort to anticipate the consequences of its beliefs and to take responsibility for them, it might give more thought to the suggestion that gods and men somehow complement one another in a kind of friendship, abuse of which, as in any abused friendship, can be expected to change the relationship to antagonism and the infliction by the aggrieved party of punitive (corrective) action on its former “friend.” [Mpea] [Mip] [Dnc]