Iokaste seems to be insisting that it does not matter what the sole survivor says at this point, but her argument that this is so because everyone heard his account makes no sense; the fidelity of her recollection has never been at issue. Surely the witness can admit now that he lied then. No matter how many people heard him tell that lie, he can, if he wishes, confess to it and change his account. She is right, however, that what he says now really should not matter, for a mountain of circumstantial evidence already contradicts his testimony. Teiresias’s revelation also contradicts it. Both Teiresias and the circumstantial evidence speak to the fact that the eyewitness account was false. The baselessness of Iokaste’s argument suggests her desperation to avert a danger that she has realized. The question is: what danger? Having heard Oidipous’s narrative, she must see as clearly as he that he nearly certainly did kill Laios. The problem is the veracity of Teiresias’s statements, which she has been at pains to negate throughout the present discussion. This suggests that she can live with the fact that her second husband killed her first, but she cannot live with Teiresias’s being right about it, because by the argument she herself gave a while ago (ll. 707-25), this means that the prophet (whether it was Teiresias or the Pythia makes little difference) may well also have spoken accurately when he or she warned that Laios would be killed by the child born to him and Iokaste. Having put Teiresias’s credibility at issue and found it to hold up in one instance, Iokaste has implicitly compelled herself to reconsider his other prophecies. The implications must so terrify her that she now takes an obviously untenable position regarding the eyewitness. In calling the audience’s attention to the fact that the eyewitness can indeed recant his testimony and should be regarded with utmost skepticism even if he does not, she also calls attention to the fact that even the most improbable of Teiresias’s predictions may in the long run be realized, and furthermore that his statements, especially when they lay out the consequences for disobedience to the god, cannot be retracted without severely damaging the god’s credibility. The insight she delivers seems thus again to come from the god, who can be heard to say, “the [prophetic] speech has manifested itself precisely as you understood it, and this it is not possible for [the prophet] to change.” Iokaste having called the entire city to witness the sole survivor’s lie suggests that when the populace shares in accepting misleading speech, the negative consequences affect everyone. The god having called the entire city to witness the realization of prophetic speech suggests that when the populace shares in dismissing prophecy, the negative consequences affect everyone. Consequently, if Athens, like Iokaste, has been acting on the premise that it can and must negate prophecy, it should share her profound fear that the prophet’s word may prove true—perhaps to such an extent that, like her, its arguments against the accumulation of circumstantial evidence no longer make much sense. [Md] [Mpea] [Mw]