The Chorus seems to be expressing a maxim, but if so, to have gotten it wrong: power might well corrupt, but when does corruption beget power? Before concluding that this expression needs to be corrected, another oddity might be noted. If the Chorus is indeed commenting on Oidipous’s devolution from the town’s savior to its polluter, from one able to outwit a supernatural being to a religious skeptic who publicly denigrates prophecy, it is strange that it should describe this change in terms of biological procreation. What does biological reproduction have to do with the transformation? The audience will recall that Φυτεύει is also the verb that the Oracle at Delphi used in the participial form (φυτεύσαντος; l. 793) to describe the father whose killer Oidipous must become. The resonance suggests that Oidipous’s begetting, an act of direct disobedience to the god, was itself an instance of hybris, which Kamerbeek takes to mean “disregard for [the divine laws].” LSJ list other meanings: “wanton violence,” “grievous assault,” and “insolence.” These meanings easily apply to Laios’ disregard for the prophecy proscribing intercourse with his wife. Do they also apply to the fatal altercation at the crossroads? In the sense that Laios’ hybris (disdain for the god’s prohibition on intercourse with Iokaste) spawned Oidipous, Oidipous’s killing of Laios, the act that paved the way to his being given Laios’ place on the seat of power and in Iokaste’s bed, could not have occurred had he not taken flight from the prophecy he received at Delphi. If Kamerbeek is right to identify divine law as the object of Oidipous’s disdain, the prophecy Oidipous rejected was a communication of divine law. To regard Delphi, as Oidipous does, as the source of predictions analogous, say, to weather forecasts, is to manifest hybris, a disdain for divine law demanding divine punishment. So, while the Chorus seems to want to say that power pollutes by breeding insolence towards Apollo, the audience observes that this same insolence has literally begotten the future tyrant, made him a murderer, installed him in power, and led him to heinous begettings of his own. The mention of tyranny would have prompted the Athenian audience to make a further association, for according to Thucydides, Pericles openly characterized Athens’ relationship to her client states as a “tyranny.” Thus the audience might well have understood either possible reading of the Chorus’s statement in relation to Athens’ geopolitical situation: either the city’s hybris–its disregard for Delphi and divine law–has led it to convert its hegemony to tyranny, or its hegemony-cum-tyranny has begotten such hybris that it is now prepared to ignore the moderating role of institutional prophecy at Delphi. Consequently, Athens can expect to be dealt a fate comparable to that prophesied for Oidipous, one such as that expressed in response to the Spartans’ question regarding war with Athens. Athens appears to be like Oidipous in several important and related respects: 1) it has risen to a position of supreme power; 2) it has received (albeit indirectly) a Delphic prophecy foretelling events that the city is unwilling to accept; and 3) it has decided to take its wellbeing into its own hands by contesting the Oracle’s veracity and the god’s power to enforce its predictions. Given the certainty of Oidipous’s fate, the parallel forecasts Athens’ failure in its contest with the Oracle and Apollo in whose name it operates. That failure will, when it occurs, demonstrate that the Oracle does in fact speak for the god. Athens’ defeat and the doom it spells will then be correctly interpreted as Apollo’s just response to the city’s hybris: its disregard for the divine order. As Kamerbeek interprets, “a king who would neglect the divine order of things will become a tyrant and lawlessness will be rife in his city and will lead to the doom of the citizens as well as himself” (176). [Gt-a] [Md] [Mw] [P] [Aj]