The Sphinx

The riddle at Thebes

The Sphinx is a creature with a woman’s face, a lion’s body and wings. She is set loose on the city of Thebes. She questions everyone who comes near and kills those who cannot answer.

Then Oedipus arrives. In the version most people know, the Sphinx asks what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening. Oedipus answers that it is a human being. A person crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult and leans on a stick in old age. His answer ends the blockade of the city and wins him its empty throne.

Two ancient writers, Apollodorus and Diodorus, agree on what happens next. Once Oedipus gives the answer, “the Sphinx threw herself from the citadel.” Diodorus adds that she did it “in accordance with the oracle which the myth recounts.” An oracle was a message from a god about what was fated to happen.

A riddle written down late

None of the earliest surviving sources gives the riddle in those words. The early Greek poet Hesiod says only that the creature destroyed the Cadmeans, the people of Thebes. The Odyssey, Homer’s poem about the hero Odysseus, tells of Oedipus without mentioning her at all. The playwright Sophocles calls her “the riddling Sphinx” but does not repeat her question.

The first surviving text of the riddle comes from the writer Athenaeus, around AD 200. He took it from a lost fourth-century BC study of tragedy by Asclepiades of Tragilus. So the famous words reach us centuries after the stories of the creature and of the man who solved her riddle.

Phix and her parents

Hesiod does not call her Sphinx. He calls her Phix, the form of the name used in Boeotia, the region around Thebes. The same word survives in the name of Mount Phicium in Boeotia.

Hesiod’s family tree is short, and it can be read two ways. Her mother may be Echidna or the Chimaera, while Orthus stays her father. Apollodorus changes the pair entirely. He names Echidna and Typhon as her parents. The early wording leaves the question open, and the names do not all fit one settled family.

Two other endings

Pausanias, a Greek traveller who wrote a guide to Greece, describes the Boeotian mountain where local people placed the Sphinx. He gives two quite different stories, and neither ends with a leap.

In the first, she is no monster at all. She leads a raiding force that “put in at Anthedon” with a fleet of ships and seizes the mountain, “until Oedipus overwhelmed her by the superior numbers of the army” he brought from Corinth.

In the second, she is an illegitimate daughter of King Laius. Laius had entrusted her with a secret oracle. She uses it to keep her half-brothers from a throne that should have gone to the sons of Epicaste.

Both of these Sphinxes die by defeat or by being found out, and not by a leap after a riddle. So on the ground where the story is set, the familiar ending is only one telling out of three.

Not the Sphinx of Egypt

The writer Aelian sets the Greek and Egyptian creatures side by side on purpose. “The Egyptians who work in sculpture, and the boastful legends of Thebes,” he writes, both reach for a “twofold nature” and “try to show us a double-formed creature,” built “from the body of a maiden and of a lion.” In his view, sculptors and storytellers solve the same problem in different ways.

The Great Sphinx at Giza, described by the writer Pliny the Elder, is a different being with a different job. Pliny calls it “a still more wondrous object of art, but one upon which silence has been observed, as it is looked upon as a divinity.” The people living nearby believed it held the burial of “King Harmaïs.” This Sphinx sets no riddle and stops no traveller. People approached it in silence, and its story was about a king, not a maiden’s face.

A marble sphinx at Delphi

The people of the island of Naxos raised a different sphinx at Delphi, beside the sanctuary, or sacred ground, of the god Apollo. Around 560 BC they set a marble sphinx on a column made of six drums. At the top was an Ionic capital, the carved head of a column in the Ionic style, and it is one of the earliest of its kind still standing. In 1861 three large pieces of the body were found beneath the sanctuary’s retaining wall of many-sided stones. The statue itself stands 2.22 metres tall. The whole monument, with its column and base, reaches about 12.45 metres.

This sphinx was a gift, not a guard set against travellers. The Naxians gave it to Pythian Apollo, as Apollo was called at Delphi, in return for promanteia, the right to put a question to the oracle ahead of other visitors waiting their turn. An inscription of the fourth century BC on the base renewed that right generations later.

The same winged, woman-headed figure does two kinds of work. In the Theban myth it demands death from strangers. In the sanctuary it asks nothing. The Naxian sphinx still stands in the Delphi Archaeological Museum.