Iokaste advises Oidipous that he will “bear life with greatest ease” (ῥᾷστα) if he does not allow himself to be bothered by the fears he has been experiencing, but will she be able to do as she advises when she learns that she has for years been married to her son? And if she could, would her character not be grotesque? The audience knows from the myth that she will hang herself from a rafter in her bedchamber. [Gm] It can anticipate that she will be horrified not only by the tabu broken by incest with her son, but equally or even more by the falsity of her assumptions, the futility of her efforts, the bankruptcy of the values that permit these efforts, and the monstrous impiety of which she will find she has been guilty. [Mpea] [P] Her suffering and suicide may in this sense appear to be a suitable punishment for her crime, which was to disregard the god’s powers and give herself licence to ignore his instructions. [Mw] [Aj] She will despair to learn that unbeknownst to her, she has always been under a god’s close supervision. [Apa] Her reassurance to her husband that he need not fear having sex with his mother (a conversation much like the one she and Laios would surely have had prior to intercourse) cries out for correction. Her advice invites destruction. The audience also now knows that there is a good counter-argument to her philosophy, which is that things might not be as they seem; the gods might interfere in the lives of mortal men and women even when they give no sign of it. More likely the gods are giving signs of their interest in mortals’ lives, but mortals simply refuse to read them as signs and give them credence. With a plague in Athens, the possibility of divine interference cannot be ignored. The first step, then, to a life of greatest ease, is to regard what appear to be chance events as signs of the gods’ involvement in mortal affairs. [Nc]