Diagnosing that Oidipous does not evaluate “strange new things … in terms of old,” Iokaste associates her husband’s troubled state of mind with faulty reasoning, which implies that she still holds to the “old” understandings she espoused just prior to the choral ode, namely, that one should ignore prophecy, because Laios died a long time after his only son had been consigned to death. The audience, on the other hand, knows that the prophecy she has in mind was not at all in error, which enables it to observe that she is persisting in her old error. He approved her argument when she made it, but now he appears to be unhinged by the necessity of considering that prophecy may not so easily be disproven. The approach critical to an accurate interpretation, then, is not old in light of new, as Iokaste believes, nor prophecy in light of event, but event in light of prophecy. One must look not to prove or disprove prophecy, but to make sense of events based upon the prophecies that might touch upon them. [Mpea] [Mip] [Md] [P] [Mw]