Mention of Zeus’s “eternally deathless rule” immediately following the suggestion that he might fail to attend to challenges to his supremacy seems to hint at a threat to the god: “If you do not make a vivid example of such challenges, your eternal rule will end and you will die.” This itself amounts to a challenge of the very sort against which the Chorus has seemed to be inveighing. Even when it believes itself to be acting and speaking piously, the people of Thebes are dictating terms to their god. This invites punishment, and as the audience can see far better than they, it is being meted out. The plague in Athens raises the question, then: do the people of Athens recognize that their expressions of piety are themselves manifestations of impiety, deserving of the punishment that is in fact already being meted out? [Mpe] [P] [Gt-a] [Aj]