When he describes Polybos as “the father who reared me and conceived me,” Oidipous repeats again a form of the qualifying word meaning “birth” father said to him at Delphi, yet here he combines ἐξέφυσε “begot” with the verb ἐξέθρεψε “raised.” He thus conflates the father who spawned him with the one who raised him, as though they were one and the same, while Delphi used the first term alone to signal a separation between the two fathers. The error reflects a lack of precision on Oidipous’s part. A wrong assumption that two parental functions are fulfilled by a single person led him to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, made him guilty of the wrong man’s death, induced him to take wrongful possession of his rightful inheritance, and married him to the wrong woman. Due to the one wrong assumption, his problem is the opposite of what he thinks; not that he will never again be able to set foot in his native country, but rather that he has already spent altogether too much time afoot there. Wrong assumptions are of course not uncommon and can be excused. The yoking of the two verbs “begot” and “raised,” however, points up the fact that the god was at pains to correct this error not the source of this error. He was making a distinction that would have allowed Oidipous to avoid the sequence of intolerable actions in which he has become caught up. The audience can ascribe responsibility for Oidipous’s error to his lack of care in listening to what the god was trying to tell him. So occupied was he with his perception that the god did not adequately honor him that he himself did not sufficiently respect to the god’s word. Nor is this the only instance of Oidipous’s making a false assumption; despite his story to the contrary, he has never really doubted that Polybos and Merope are his natural parents. He has far too easily accepted the idea that the god was hostile to him and that his hostility was unprovoked and unjustified. He wrongly wishes that he could render the god impotent and he wrongly believes that this can be accomplished by sabotaging the god’s intolerable prophecy. He has set himself against Apollo, and the god has evidently responded by making a mockery of each of these false assumptions by fulfilling the prophecy clause by clause precisely as Oidipous mistook them. [Mpe] [P] [Aj] [Apa]