The god characterizes the generation that Oidipous will bring to light—the children— as ἄτλητον, and this may seem to him to mean that men will not be able tolerate the offspring of an incestuous marriage. But having already found it appropriate and enlightening to give Oidipous’s interpretation a critical appraisal, the audience will find that, like μειχθῆναι, this word allows for other meanings that in turn suggest other ways of interpreting the prophecy. For one thing, it may rather be Oidipous who will not tolerate the discovery that his children are tainted by incest. But the word ἄτλητον has connotations that run in an altogether different direction as well, because its root in the verb τλάω means “dare,” “endure,” “bear,” and even “submit.” In the adjectival form, it can have either an active or a passive meaning. Whichever of these meanings it carries is then negated by the alpha privative prefixed to it. The use of this word here can be taken to suggest that the γένος (“offspring,” “race,” “generation”) that Oidipous will bring forth will not be tolerant, accepting, or submissive in the way earlier generations may have been. The god may be commenting, then, not so much on Oidipous’s moral legacy as on the attitudes that will characterize the next generation. What these attitudes may be is left unstated, but one has only to think back to the beginning of the play, when Oidipous addressed as “children” the crowd of supplicants gathered before the palace and the ease with which they were persuaded to accept Oidipous as a substitute for Apollo. The city did not offer any resistance to his presumption that the god would not answer their prayers in person or even send a substitute. If Thebes’ attitudes are in some sense intolerant, then most of all of the god. If intolerable, then surely most of all to the god, who seems to have reacted to the new generation of religious skeptics by rendering every living Theban being—plant, animal, and human—incapable of bearing offspring. In order to prevent the handing down of impious attitudes and actions to yet another generation the god has stopped the process of generation altogether. [Md] [P] [Apaon]