The Sphinx in the Oedipus story is a winged monster that terrorizes the city of Thebes by killing anyone who cannot answer her riddle. She has the body of a lion, the wings of a large bird, and the face and breast of a woman. When Oedipus answers the riddle correctly, the Sphinx destroys herself, and Oedipus is rewarded with the throne of Thebes and marriage to the queen. That marriage, to his own mother Jocasta, sets the rest of the tragedy in motion.
A Monster Sent as Punishment
The Sphinx didn’t simply wander into Thebes on her own. In Greek mythology, the goddess Hera sent the creature to punish the city for an ancient crime, possibly the failure to atone for offenses committed by a former Theban king. In some versions, the war god Ares is the one responsible, seeking revenge because the city’s founder Cadmus had killed a dragon sacred to him. Either way, the Sphinx was a deliberate curse, not a random threat.
She stationed herself on a rocky outcrop along the road into Thebes and intercepted travelers. Anyone who couldn’t solve her riddle was killed on the spot, devoured whole and raw. The people of Thebes were trapped, unable to rid themselves of a creature whose weapon was her intellect rather than brute force alone.
The Riddle and Its Answer
Interestingly, Sophocles never actually states the riddle in his play Oedipus Rex. The version everyone knows comes from other ancient sources. The fullest form, preserved by the writer Athenaeus, goes like this: “A thing there is whose voice is one, whose feet are four and two and three. So mutable a thing is none that moves in earth or sky or sea. When on most feet this thing doth go, its strength is weakest and its pace most slow.”
A shorter, more familiar version simply asks: “What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening?”
The answer is a human being. A baby crawls on four limbs, an adult walks on two legs, and an old person uses a cane as a third support. Oedipus was the only one to solve it. Some lesser-known accounts include a second riddle as well: “There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other, and she in turn gives birth to the first.” The answer is day and night, which in ancient Greek are both feminine nouns, making the “sisters” metaphor work naturally in the original language.
What Happened After the Riddle
When Oedipus answered correctly, the Sphinx threw herself from her perch and died. The city was freed, and the people hailed Oedipus as their savior. Creon, who was acting as regent after King Laius had recently been killed, offered two rewards: the throne of Thebes and the hand of the widowed queen, Jocasta.
Oedipus accepted both, not knowing that Laius was the man he had killed in a roadside quarrel, or that Jocasta was his biological mother. The very act that made him a hero also sealed his fate. His triumph over the Sphinx is the hinge of the entire story, the moment that places him exactly where the prophecy said he would end up.
What the Sphinx Represents
The Sphinx is what scholars call a liminal creature, something that exists between categories. She is part human, part lion, part bird. She is neither fully animal nor fully person, and that blending of identities is precisely what makes her so threatening. In Greek myth, creatures like this (centaurs, sirens, amazons) represent forces that challenge the boundaries humans use to make sense of the world.
What sets the Sphinx apart from other monsters is that her power lies in her mind, not her claws. She doesn’t ambush travelers in combat. She asks a question. The fact that the answer to her riddle is “man” adds a layer of irony that runs through the entire play. Oedipus understands humanity in the abstract well enough to solve the puzzle, but he cannot see the truth about his own identity. He is both the solver and the subject, the one who names “man” as the answer while failing to know himself.
Literary critics have long noted this double meaning. The answer to the riddle, and the person who answers it, are the same: Man turns out to be both the preserver of Thebes and its greatest source of pollution. Oedipus rescues the city from one curse only to become the cause of another, a plague that descends on Thebes because its king has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.
Not the Same as the Egyptian Sphinx
People often confuse the Greek Sphinx with the Great Sphinx of Giza, but the two have almost nothing in common beyond a lion’s body and a human head. The Egyptian Sphinx is male, benevolent, and serves as a guardian of sacred spaces. It symbolizes royal power and protection, sitting calmly outside tombs and temples. The Greek Sphinx is female, hostile, and winged. She exists to destroy, not to protect.
The Egyptian version is a symbol of stability. The Greek version is a symbol of chaos, an intellectual predator that the city cannot overcome until Oedipus arrives. Where one guards the boundary between the living and the dead, the other embodies the terrifying gap between what humans think they know and what they actually understand.