When Oidipous says that it is not possible for him to set foot in his fatherland, the audience knows that he has long since set foot there and committed the deeds that he intends to avoid, but the word ἐμβατεῦσαι (“set foot in”) also has a legal meaning: to come into the estate left by a deceased father (Knox 93). Ever since the moment of his arrival in Thebes, Oidipous been enjoying all the rights, privileges, and property that his father left behind when he was killed. Unfortunately for the son and heir, among these are the father’s bed and the woman with whom he slept, and just as his intercourse with the woman in the bed he inherited is prohibited, so was the father’s intercourse with the same woman in the same bed. Thus the son seems also to have inherited his father’s proclivity to engage in forbidden acts, for which the punishment seems likewise to have passed down to him. Yet, if the father was justly punished for disobedience in regard to prohibited intercourse, the son’s punishment would be unjust, for he has endeavored to avoid the crime. If Apollo is not unjust to punish Oidipous, then the crimes for Oidipous is to be punished cannot be incest or parricide. With respect to Laios, marital intercourse was not itself an offense; it was his disregard for the instruction to avoid it, if he wished to save the city. The issue, then, was whether he put the city’s wellbeing ahead of the enjoyment of what he regarded as his own rights. Has Oidipous, then, failed in any similar regard? He has assiduously followed through with his commitment to save the city. His faultseems to lie in his failure to disambiguate the message Delphi delivered; where he understood “murderer” Apollo seems likely to have been instructing him to serve as his executioner (cf. m 528). Oidipous’s crime, if it is one, seems to be no more than his misinterpretation of a word. If this is just, then it puts a great deal of weight on the obligation to disambiguate a prophecy. One should begin, it would seem, by presuming that the god requires the performance of an action, and this must be followed by the presumption of that act’s justice and necessity. [Gd] [Mipd] [Aj] [Mpea] [Dnc] [Dnp]