In Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, what does Jocasta have to say about oracles and prophecy, and why do you think she expresses this attitude? How do her...

When acomes from
Corinth to tellthat his father, Polybus, has died of natural causes,uses this as evidence to
support her opinion that prophecy is impossible and oracles cannot tell the future. She asks her
husband

Why should a mortal man, the sport of chance,

With no assured foreknowledge, be afraid?
Best live a careless life from
hand to mouth.
This wedlock with thy mother fear not thou.
How oft it
chances that in dreams a man
Has wed his mother! He who least regards
Such
brainsick phantasies lives most at ease.

In other words,
she asks why, when the legitimacy of prophecy is so apparently called into question by this
information, a man would fear it. Clearly, for her, chance is in control and not prophecy. She
thinks it is best to be carefree and worry only about the present because it is impossible to
know the future. She tells Oedipus not to worry about the second part of the prophecy since the
first part seems not to have come true. She thinks that it is totally...