Ηaving laid out these three conditions as the protasis of a conditional sentence, the main clause comes as a curse: “May an evil fate seize “him/ her/it.” The openness of the object pronoun invites the audience to test the curse against all referents it has considered in response to the first three clauses: Oidipous, Iokaste, Thebes and itself. All have been explicitly cursed, and in all four cases signs of the curse’s realization are already manifest. The Chorus’s curse, then, will not affect any of them in the slightest. Its utterance, however, enables the audience to see that the god’s actions are neither unjust nor cruel; rather, they are very much in keeping with the expectations and wishes of the citizenry. This perception can be measured against Athens; in visiting an “evil fate” upon the city the god may be behaving quite reasonably and altogether within the bounds expected by his followers, including the citizenry of contemporary Thebes, which was allied with Sparta in the war against Athens. Thus, the curse uttered by the Chorus of Thebans will have rung with the sound of contemporary criticism for Athens’ contempt for “fellow travelers” upon the roads linking the Greek cities, disregard for its own transgressions against justice, and its decision not to avail itself of Delphi’s capacity to provide independent arbitration and so to find a resolution to differences presently necessitating war. [Gt-a] [Aj] [Mi]