Where Oidipous means that he defiles Laios’ bed by sleeping in it with his victim’s wife, what he can be heard to say is that he pollutes the victim’s bed “in” his hands. This evokes the horrifying image of Oidipous caressing and holding his wife and mother with the same hands that slew her husband and his father. The relative pronoun ὧνπερ (“by means of which”) may refer to the hands or the bed (a plural noun). Thus, his words may be construed to mean either that Laios died at Oidipous’s hands as Oidipous intends or that he died on account of his marriage bed as the god had warned. The mention of hands again recalls that it was foretold to the father that he would die at the hands of his son if he did not heed the god’s admonition to refrain from intercourse with his wife (l. 722). The double entendre points up the fact that Apollo more than once warned Laios and at least once warned Oidipous about the killing and the pollution of the marriage bed. In the one instance, the pollution of the marriage bed through disobedience to the god necessitates the killing; in the other instance, the killing leads to a polluted marriage. The killing, then, that Oidipous believes to be the cause of pollution begins as its consequence, and in that instance Oidipous acted as the god’s agent. It would seem, then, that the divine project to punish the impiety of ignoring the god’s instructions and attempting to thwart the god’s justice engages the instrument of justice in new pollution. Divine “justice” appears to be noxious—it unjustly subjects the god’s own agent to suffering and pollutes the city that he rules. And yet surely such a finding is itself impious, and if it leads a city (Thebes or Athens) to determine upon a course of action in defiance of the perceived divine injustice, this new impiety will itself warrant the god’s punitive intervention, in which case the new wave of sufferings to which the city and its rulers are subjected will be just. This paradox might be resolved by tracing the sequence of cause and effect to its origins, but this is problematic because the myth stretches back to deeds predating even Oidipous’s prohibited conception. If a resolution is to be found, then, it must reside not in the problem of identifying the original fault, but in the discovery of the proper means for bringing the sequence of errors and misdeeds to a close. [Gm] [Gd] [Mpei] [Mpea] [Mg] [Aj] [P]