The metaphorical language employed by the Chorus pictures the consequences of this error, or perhaps all of these many errors just evoked, as a banquet at which feed ravening beasts that, like carrion, pick at corpses on the field of battle or within the walls of a plague-infested town. The apocalyptic vision seems to be a prophetic forecast of what Thebes has yet to suffer, and it traces this hellish future back to that moment when the “phantasm of words”—the prophecies coming to fulfillment through the riddle’s solution—entered the city. Whatever the image might mean, it casts a lurid light upon the dispute between Kreon and Oidipous and the latter’s attitude towards the seer. And yet, the obscurity and metaphorical vividness of the town’s language make Teiresias’s earlier revelations seem direct and unambiguous. [Mw] [Mip]