The audience will slightly amend Oidipous’s statement: everything would be well and good if the woman who bore him didn’t happen now to be standing right beside him as his wife. The problem is not, and never has been, that his mother lives. The problem is their marriage, which was not to be avoided by awaiting her death any more than it was to be avoided by leaving Corinth. But then was he to acquiesce in it? Was he willingly to do the unthinkable, the unspeakable? Does such a demand not make the god a monster? If the god is a monster, better to resist, even if resistance is futile. [Aj] [Md] [P] Or was there something else that Oidipous could have done? Was there another way to understand what the Pythia told him? [Mipd]