Iokaste’s conclusion that it is therefore “best” (κράτιστον, literally: “most powerful”) to live “at will” (εἰκῇ) reveals the unspoken motives for her philosophical position: her own will to power and independence of action. [Md] That these drives dominate and distort her faculty of reason is observable in her foregoing comment about chance events, which affords the play’s audience a damning insight into her character, and to the extent that her views already have their Athenian proponents, the audience can transpose both her character and her error onto them. [Mpea] [Gt-a] Those Athenians may, like Oidipous, be calculating the improbability that circumstances will accord with prophecy. He might, for example, suppose that Merope might not be his biological mother; what are the odds that the woman given to him in marriage by the city of Thebes will turn out to be his birth mother? Iokaste’s counsel not to concern himself with this prophecy seems doubly secure; first, on the extreme improbability of his coming upon and marrying his biological mother; and second, on reasonable doubts that the Oracle at Delphi is in fact authorized to speak for Apollo. Persuaded by these considerations, neither Iokaste nor Oidipous has found it necessary to weigh the alternative proposition; namely, that if the gods have any capacity to exert influence upon men’s lives, they should be able to contrive a sexual union even between individuals making every effort never to mate, for if there is but one chance in millions that something might occur, then it can occur, and if it can occur, then a god may be able to arrange for its occurrrence according to his or her will (εἰκῇ). The god’s capacity for intervention, if it exists at all, nullifies any calculation of probability. It is crucial for mortals to understand that chance and probability are not the same. It is chance, not probability, that affords the gods an opportunity to effect their will in the mortal domain. So, where Iokaste insists upon the significance of chance in order to allay her husband’s fears, she means freedom from determination, while the audience may be learning to recognize and appreciate the fact that it is precisely in the guise of chance that the gods find scope for their interventions into human affairs. The audience has thus found an answer to the issue raised earlier when Iokaste counseled Oidipous that “the mortal world has no share of prophetic art” (l. 709) and therefore, by implication, that the gods have no part in mortal affairs. The appearance of “chance” (τύχη) is itself one of the avenues by which the gods can take a role in human lives. Iokaste has lived her life in the belief that chance protected her. On the possibility that she might not get pregnant she acquiesced in intercourse with her husband, and then when she chanced to fall pregnant she agreed with him to expose her baby. She was confident that the exposed infant would not survive. She might even allow herself to hope that her baby boy would not die, for if he did not perish as he was meant to, it was highly unlikely that he make his way to Thebes, and even if he did, it was even more unlikely that he should kill Laios. When Iokaste does become pregnant, then, she still finds protection in the combined improbability of the other events. If, however, the probability that one might be struck by lightning not once, but repeatedly, seems remote, that is because one does not consider the possibility that lightning bolts are flung by gods. As the audience knows only too well, each and every one of the events that Iokaste deems extremely improbable has come to pass precisely because a god has been at work to turn possibilities into realities. [Mpea] [Dc]