Iokaste immediately infers that something has happened to Polybos, but she does not go so far as to ask directly whether he is dead. She appears not to want to seem too eager to celebrate the king’s death. The audience can infer that while she is pleased, she is not beside herself with joy or relief, for his death touches less her own fears than those of her husband. His emotional state is a matter of great enough concern to her, however, that she has prayed for divine assistance to persuade Oidipous to think about the past in relation to the present, for her own argument that past unrealized prophecies proved prophecy’s unreliability had failed to persuade him to ignore prophecy. Now just moments after uttering her prayer, new proof has arrived appearing to support the conclusion that prophecy is an unreliable predictor. It must seem to her that her prayer has in part been answered. And yet if it has been, the god to whom she prayed would be supporting the argument that one should ignore the prophetic institution that operates under his authority. Considering moreover that Polybos must have died at least two to three days ago, in order for the messenger’s arrival to represent an immediate response to Iokaste’s prayer, Apollo will have to have dispatched him long before any of the incidents that led her to try prayer. He had to have anticipated the present circumstance and have responded to it in the past in order to demonstrate that he has no power. The contradiction is flatly absurd. It makes a terrible mockery of Iokaste’s thought process, from her decision to pray for divine help in refuting divine powers of communication to her belief that a god has answered her prayer by sending the help she requested. Iokaste has of course not presently given voice to any of these thoughts; if they occur in anyone’s mind, it must be that of the audience, which ascribes them to her as a way to understand her self-control. It is the audience, then, whose assumptions the god’s action ultimately mock. If the audience senses the absurdity of such contradictory assumptions, it can correct its error by understanding that Apollo is not responding to Iokaste’s help affirmatively by giving her what she wants, but negatively by realizing his own project, which depends in part upon giving Iokaste the opportunity to reveal her godlessness and so to justify the punishment to which she is being subjected. The god’s response to prayers or curses is neither automatic nor direct; he acts according to his own judgment, and this allows him to stay clear of the self-contradictions to which mortals are subject. [Apa] [Apc] [Aj]