Feeling obliged to defend themselves against Oidipous’s complaint that their lack of faith has dulled his heart and insisting that they would be insane to forsake him now, Thebes’ citizens cite his besting of the sphinx. Yet as they bring up the one fact upon which their judgment depends, they seem rather to be desperately trying to persuade themselves to put their faith in him despite what Teiresias has said; the Chorus seems willfully to be blinding itself to its own misgivings. For the audience, however, there can be little doubt; the seer’s words are accurate; Teiresias can be relied upon to serve as a legitimate medium of insight. One should perhaps rather look more critically, then, at Oidipous’s defeat of the sphinx. Indeed, given that that success led directly to the fulfillment of the prophecy that Oidipous marry his mother, it should probably not taken as a measure of Oidipous’s capacity to solve problems of supernatural origin. So where the citizenry wants to interpret Oidipous’s successes as signs of his extraordinary competence and to read Teiresias’s apparent failures as signs of his incompetence, the audience knows that the reverse will soon be shown to have been the case. Good sense, then, does not regard as definitive the available evidence for the success and failure either of human ingenuity or prophetic insight; one should hold in reserve the possibility that the evidence will in time take on a different meaning. Bearing this in mind, the audience should find it unwise for the citizenry turn its back (ἐνοσφιζόμαν; l. 692) on prophecy, for otherwise it will eventually have shown itself (πεφάνθαι μ᾽ ἄν; l. 692) to be without any pathway to good sense (ἄπορον ἐπὶ φρόνιμα; l. 691). This the citizenry does not do. Forced into an uncomfortable choice between ruler and seer, the Chorus chooses to stake everything on the hope that Oidipous might again prove a good pilot (εὔπομπος). Indeed, its present speech is filled with metaphorical connections to navigation both on and off the water: “blown onto the right course” (κατ’ ὀρθὸν οὔρισας; l. 695), “wandering aimlessly” (ἀλύουσαν; l. 695), “without passage” (ἄπορον; l. 691), and being “off track” (παραφρόνιμον; l. 691). These metaphors recall the priest’s earlier metaphorical description of the city foundering (σαλεύει/σάλου at ll. 23-4) and Oidipous’s setting upright (ἀνόρθωσον at l. 46) the ship of state (ναῦς at l. 56). Maritime metaphors are well suited to Athens, the preeminent maritime power of its time. The Chorus seems to speak more for Athens, then, than Thebes. The Athenian citizenry should accordingly reconsider its support for its leaders’ decision to ignore prophecy, in particular: the prophecy promising a Spartan victory and offering the god’s assistance in bringing it about. [Gms] [Mg] [Gt-a] [Mi] [Mp]