These lines have prompted scholars to attempt a number of emendations aimed at rendering good sense. Dawe identifies three options for the “basic sense” to which I add a fourth from Kamerbeek:
1) “What wicked man will ever escape the wrath of the gods?”
2) “Who, in company like this, will ever make pious prayers?”
3) “What man in this situation will be strong enough thereafter to keep from his life the shafts of the gods?”
4) “Who will abstain from warding off (from the πόλις) with passion (θυμῷ) the shafts which wound his soul (βέλη ψυχᾶς)?” The shafts are a metaphor for the anguish caused by the impious actions the Chorus has just listed.
Musgrave’s proposes substituting εὔξεται for ἔρξεται. This has the advantage of focusing explicitly on the act of prayer that is central to this passage and expanding it with a double entendre: not only “will pray” but “will boast.” Rather than praying to the gods, both Iokaste and Oidipous have just been boasting, explicitly or implicitly, of their success in warding off pestilential arrows that Apollo prophesied for them: Laios’ murder at the hands of his son and Oidipous’s parricide and incest. Read this way, the ambiguous prepositional phrase ἐν τοῖσδ᾽ invites the audience to extend the Chorus’s list of crimes to include the boast of having defeated the god by nullifying his prophetic word. Hearing the double entendre and understanding the “arrows” also to mean the plague (cf. ll. 203-4) that besets both Thebes and Athens, the audience may understand the god to be posing the following rhetorical question: “What mortal will under these conditions [i.e. when eventually it is understood that the plague is a manifestation of divine action] still boast / That he wards the gods’ arrows from his soul?” [Gd] [Mp] [Aj] [Apa] [Mw] Giving expression to this view, the Chorus seems to understand what the god means to communicate. It is no longer inclined to see its mortal rulers as more capable than the gods. Indeed, it has throughout this ode been affirming the gods’ power and the consequent necessity that mortals maintain a pious relationship with them. It has called a curse down upon a variety of behaviors that could jeopardize that relationship: contempt for justice, failing to reverence the seats of the divinities, arrogance, taking improper advantage, tolerating blasphemy, impropriety, and touching the untouchable. The Chorus seems to be distancing itself from all such error and those, including those rulers, who fall into it. The town’s present conviction seems to be that if impiety and other crimes against gods or humanity go unpunished, mortals will have no reason to eschew such behavior. The mention of arrows, furthermore, recalls the metaphorical description of Apollo-sent plague and thus makes it clear, to the audience at any rate, that Apollo is already doing just as the Chorus prays for him to do; he is punishing wrongdoing, including that in which the populace is itself implicated. This the Chorus does not yet understand, for if it is considering the possibility that mortals may in future have no basis for supplicative prayer, it seems to be missing the very point that it is requesting the god to make. Its punishment is a sign that its prayers have been answered. Given the plague in Athens, the parallel suggests that the Athenian citizenry might likewise be missing the point that, contrary to its interpretation of its own circumstances, the god is on the job and doing his level best to make himself known. That he is not succeeding has to be laid at the feet of the citizenry, which seems like Thebes’ citizenry to be too dense or too blind to see even the most obvious signs of divine intervention. [Mpe] [Mi]