Against the audience’s realization that Oidipous’s hope hangs from an impossibly slender thread: namely, the unmasking of seer and Oracle as charlatans based on the reliability of the eyewitness account, Iokaste now offers a fresh set of details about the eyewitness: he implored her to post him as far as possible out of sight of the palace, and as she represents it, his request was predicated upon two circumstances: Oidipous was in power and Laios was dead. The first of these should give no grounds for any mention at all unless the man has something to hide from Oidipous or the sight of Oidipous makes him want to hide something. Of the second reason Iokaste could have made better sense; the slave was grief stricken to have witnessed the death of his king without having been able to do anything to prevent it. That Oidipous’s installation as ruler is mentioned at all is strange; that it is put before the more understandably troublesome death of his master is even stranger. Making it stranger still is the detail that, as the slave spoke to Iokaste, he touched her—a gesture reserved for the most dire situations. (Thetis, for example, touches Zeus’s knees when she wants him to requite Achilles’ honor by bringing destruction upon Troy.) The Greek, however, allows for an alternate reading of Iokaste’s account that explains what might actually have motivated his request: “when he saw you having power and having killed Laios.” The survivor sees the new ruler and recognizes him as the man whom he saw kill Laios. One can now also make sense of the order in which the events are told, because it repeats the sequence of the sole survivor’s experience. When he got back to Thebes, he reported the attack at the crossroads. Some time later Oidipous arrived outside the gates where he met the sphinx, solved her riddle, vanquished her, and was almost immediately made Thebes’ new ruler. Some time after that the sole survivor got his first glimpse of the new ruler and immediately knew him to be Laios’ killer. Was he, a slave, now to accuse the city’s savior and new tyrannos of regicide? Was he to call attention to the fact that, contrary to the report he had given, there had been only one attacker? It was easier for him and better to be placed in the fields and upland pastures farthest from the palace, where he would not be made to see Laios’ killer holding Laios’ power and married to Laios’ widow. That nothing about his request alerted Iokaste or occasioned so much as a further question lets the audience know that she does not suspect that the slave recognized Laios’ killer. To her his request was not only innocent, in her judgment he was deserving, as she now says, of more than such a modest request. But the audience, and even Oidipous, should wonder what the slave had done to merit any favors at all, for he survived the massacre while failing to defend his master. It becomes apparent that where, in regard to prophecy, Iokaste (like Oidipous) demonstrates hyper rationality, skepticism, and powers of critical thought, in response to the slave’s request she seems credulous and overly sympathetic. The uneven application of her rationality and skepticism suggest that they manifest a prejudice or serve as a useful stance rather than a genuine commitment to the truth. The audience, already knowing her philosophical skepticism to be untenable (at least in this mythic context), now finds that stance to be without integrity. The god, by contrast, is able to express himself through her speech even when its speaker may either be disingenuous or simply naïve. This characterization might be tested against those Athenians who, like Iokaste, prefer uncritically to accept the views even of mortals whose partiality is obvious rather than trusting to the integrity and impartiality of a pan-Hellenic institution such as the Oracle at Delphi. [Gd] [Mpew] [Mi] [Dnt]