That Iokaste thinks of her infant son as a “wretch” suggests that she feels bad about his death, as one expects of a mother, yet she would never have found herself in the position of permitting or even participating in the death of her newborn had she and Laios refrained from intercourse. Either she and Laios gave intercourse more importance than Laios’ life, or they set the threat at nought, in which case they felt free to indulge in intercourse without suffering the consequences of which prophecy repeatedly warned. When she falls pregnant and gives birth, however, their concern for the threatened consequence increases to the extent that they set the baby’s life at less value than the chance that they were wrong about prophecy and the god’s power to enforce it. Such thinking shows a troubling inconsistency, for if they felt truly free to disregard the god’s threats, there was no need to take their son’s life, or if they had grounds to pay heed to prophecy, they should have avoided intercourse. Their inconsistency reveals them to be uncertain about the gods’ bearing on their decisions and actions. The child is the victim of a wretched lack of clarity. “Wretched” is a good description of Iokaste’s interior mental and emotional landscape. [Mpea] [Md] It also might describe Laios, and the sentence’s grammatical structure permits the reading: “That wretched man [Laios] never killed him [the baby],” which of course accords with what the audience knows really happened. [Gd] One might wonder that, if Laios was convinced that his life depended upon the infant’s destruction, he did not see to it himself. He seems to have been willing to order his child’s death, but unwilling to do it himself or even to witness it. The inner conflict, the inconsistency to which Laios has fallen victim, permits the child to live, and this in turn allows for the prophecy to be realized. Thus, Laios’ state of mind prepares for his prophesied death at the hands of his son. The prophecy’s fulfillment, it would appear, was predicated upon a fault in Laios. That wretched fault is bound, one might infer, to have consequences that are as predictable as they are fatal. [Mpea] [Mw] “Wretched,” then, is a judgment that applies well to any mortals who would sacrifice the lives of their own kin rather than accept a limitation, to sacrifice some of their own pleasures and privileges, communicated to them by a god. [Md] [Mi]