The third qualification of the condition being enunciated by the Chorus is a failure to reverence the seats of the divinities. The expression δαιμόνων ἕδη (“divinities’ seats”) has as its possible referents all seats of the divinities. Delphi, however, alone plays a role in this tragedy’s mythos. While six places prior to this passage do mention other gods and sacred places, scarcely a line of the play has passed without giving occasion to think of Apollo, his prophecies, his agents, his apparent influence on events, or his sacred precinct at Delphi. It is safe to infer, then, that both the play itself and the myth on which it is based would have inclined the Athenian audience to take Delphi as the prime instance of the divine precinct to which the Chorus’s statement might refer. Has Oidipous failed to reverence Delphi? From his own narrative just a short while ago (ll. 774-93), the audience knows that when he was a young man he consulted Delphi to resolve a question as to his parents’ identity, and again not long before the present action he sent Kreon to consult the Oracle on the matter of the plague that was then and is now still ravaging Thebes. The play has since made the audience a direct witness to Oidipous’s commitment to carry out the god’s instructions by finding and punishing Laius’s killer. In this regard he is not at all contemptuous of the god. His scrupulous and relentless execution of Delphi’s instructions speaks directly to his confidence in Delphi as the god’s authentic voice. His willingness to endure whatever suffering follows from his service to the god recalls, moreover, the young man’s swift and unequivocal decision forever to renounce the comforts of home and family together with the advantages of his station by forever turning his back on Corinth. Thus even Laios’ death itself, which occurs as an immediate and unintended consequence of Oedipus’s decision to abandon his home, can be cited as evidence for the high regard in which he holds Delphi and so demonstrates the opposite of contempt. On the other hand, Oidipous has just supported Iokaste’s conclusion that one should not pay prophecy any heed, and his decision forever to steer clear of Corinth is based upon a belief that his own actions can render prophecy null and void. Thus it would seem that he sometimes does and sometimes does not reverence the seat of the god at Delphi. This consideration complicates identification of Oidipous as a referent for the “someone” to whom the Chorus’s sentence might apply. This might encourage the audience to broaden the scope of its investigation and review, however fleetingly, any knowledge it may have of other possible instances of disrespect towards Delphi. Nor will it have to look far, for it has been made witness on two separate occasions to Iokaste’s pleading for Oedipus not to allow prophecy to have any influence on his life, so much so that rather than yield on this point she prefers to accept the fact that her present husband is her first husband’s killer. Just prior to this choral song she drew an example from her own life to caution Oidipous not to allow himself to be influenced by concern for the prophecy of Apollo Loxias, the source of Delphic prophecy (ll. 854-8), and earlier she had aligned herself with the philosophical position that “the mortal realm has no part in a prophetic art” (βρότειον οὐδεν μαντικῆς ἔχον τέχνης, l. 709). As conflicted as the application of these judgments to Oidipous may be, the audience might be wary of an uncritical application to Iokaste, and indeed, the example of her own life contradicts the evidence she gives for looking “neither left nor right” in response to prophecy, for while in having intercourse with her husband she followed her own precept, when she then acquiesced in the killing of her infant son, she demonstrated that she was indeed afraid of prophecy. That her stated position is recognizable as a strain of Athenian philosophical discourse suggests that, if she is a candidate for identification with the subject of this conditional sentence, so may also be Athens. The audience’s preceding discovery of inconsistencies in the words and deeds of both her and Oidipous suggests that Athens consider whether it may on some occasions have avowed respect for the Oracle while on others deciding that the city should be ruled without regard for Delphic prophecy. The fact is, of course, that neither the Oracle’s integrity nor its independence were ever entirely beyond question, and both Herodotus (6.66) and Thucydides (5.16.2 and 1.112.5) relate instances when the Pythia was either actually bribed or thought to have been. Control of Delphi had even been the object of Athenian and Spartan military interventions approximately twenty years prior to the probable date of this play’s staging. While such incidents underscore the institution’s vulnerability to outside influence, they may also be seen as tests that ultimately proved the institution’s strength, for the only case of proven bribery was swiftly detected and punished, while the other accusation of bribery did not occur until the tenth year of the Peloponnesian War, or some years after this play’s probable first performance. The one proven assault on the Oracle’s integrity, then, was the military intervention that resulted in transfer of the sanctuary’s management from Delphi to Phocis. Here, however, it was none other than Athens that was responsible for undermining the Oracle’s independence. Remembering this incident, the Athenian audience might all the more sharply have felt the sting of the Chorus’s mention of anyone—person or city—that might diminish the sanctity of a sacred precinct like Delphi. If Athens is currently consciously ignoring the prophecy promising the Spartans the god’s help in achieving a victory over Athens, the tension between Athens and Delphi will have been all the more palpable. Knowing further that in the context of this play Iokaste’s reasoning will prove false, and recognizing its own speech in her mouth, the Athenian audience may catch a glimmer of recognition that it is itself a suspect for the charges of impiety just brought by the Chorus, and insofar as it sees the parallels between Iokaste, Oidipous, and itself, it may even realize that it is becoming the object of its own investigation, and further, that like Oidipous it may soon become the victim of its own public declarations, such as those that would have been expressed in dissent to motions made in the Assembly to send an embassy to Delphi to inquire of the god, what to do or say in order to resolve Athens’ conflict with the Greek cities already allied or prepared to join the Peloponnesian alliance against it. The audience’s juxtaposition of Oidipous, Iokaste, and Athens suggests, moreover, that Athens’ decision not to consult is based less on the putative pointlessness of such an action than on the strength of the city’s rejection of a consultation’s anticipated results, for Athens would have had reason to expect that if it were to submit to Delphi for advice regarding the challenge to its hegemony, it might well be directed to make concessions. The Athenian audience may be beginning to understand that as Athens continues to defend itself against Sparta despite its knowledge of the god’s promise of support for the Spartan war effort, it puts itself at cross purposes with Apollo himself. If in this respect Athens acts as Oidipous did when he fled Delphi having determined never again to cross paths with either of his parents, it can expect the god to make a similar mockery of its efforts. [Md] [Gt-a] [Mipi] [Aj] [Apao]