This sentence reads like gibberish. Oidipous’s account having just made it clear to the audience that, contrary to what Oidipous has always thought, the god was endeavoring to answer his question regarding the identity of his parents, his present sentence seems to retain traces of the emotion that caused him so seriously to misjudge the god’s intentions. [Ad] [Mpea] [Md] If his present befuddlement is a residue of what he felt when he first heard the prophecy that he must murder father and marry mother, he was utterly disconcerted. The interpretation to which his mind had erroneously leapt appears so greatly to have frightened him that it impeded–and apparently still impedes–his ability even to express a clear thought. This suggests that one must be extremely careful not to react to a disconcerting prophecy by letting one’s fears dominate one’s thought processes. [Mpe] [Mip] From this we may infer that Athens, having received the prophecy promising a Spartan victory, may similarly have reacted by first misconstruing the god’s words and then determining to set its own course opposite to that which it presumed the god meant for it to take, with the result that Athens’ reaction imposed upon the god the necessity of realizing the prophecy as it has been misinterpreted. [Gt-a] [N]