🦁 The Sphinx
The winged, lion-bodied riddler who devoured every traveller to Thebes who answered wrong
Also known as Sphinx, Sphinx of Thebes
📺 "Tonight's guest has one question for you, and she has never had to ask a second. Think about babies, think about walking sticks, and think fast."
💀 Facts
- The Greek Sphinx has a woman's head, a lion's body and the wings of a bird
- Hesiod makes her a daughter of Echidna and a sister of the Nemean lion
- She sat on a rock outside Thebes and killed everyone who could not answer her riddle
- Her riddle asks what has one voice and goes on four feet, two feet and three; the answer is a human being
- When Oedipus answered correctly, she threw herself from the rock
- Sophocles' Oedipus Rex refers to the riddle but never quotes it; the full wording survives in Apollodorus
- The Great Sphinx of Giza is a male Egyptian statue roughly two thousand years older than the Greek story
📜 Legend
The Greek Sphinx has the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird, and she is not the Sphinx of Giza: that is a male Egyptian statue carved around 2500 BCE, nearly two thousand years before her story was told, which the Greeks later named after her. Hesiod makes her a daughter of Echidna and sister of the Nemean lion, and calls her Phix. Sent by Hera to punish Thebes, she sat on a rock outside the city and put a riddle, learned from the Muses, to everyone who passed: what has one voice and goes on four feet, two feet and three? Those who could not answer were eaten, among them a son of Creon, the city's regent, who offered the throne and the hand of the widowed queen Jocasta to whoever could get rid of her. Oedipus, a stranger on the road, answered 'a human being', who crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult and leans on a stick in old age, and the Sphinx threw herself from the rock. His prize was the city and a marriage to his own mother. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, first staged around 429 BCE, refers to the riddle but never quotes it; the full wording survives in Apollodorus. Ingres painted the meeting in 1808 and Gustave Moreau in 1864, Freud named a complex after the winner, and she still asks riddles in Harry Potter's Triwizard maze and Percy Jackson's Labyrinth.
🎭 Myth vs Movie
True or false? Make your guess, then click a card (or press r) for the verdict.
The riddle of the Sphinx is quoted in full in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex.
✘ FALSE
Sophocles' audience knew it already, so the play only refers to the 'riddling Sphinx' and Oedipus's cleverness. The full riddle survives in Apollodorus and in a few other late sources.
The Greek Sphinx and the Great Sphinx of Giza are the same creature.
✘ FALSE
The Giza statue is male, wingless and about two thousand years older than the Theban story. The Greeks borrowed the name for it; the myth of the riddling monster is their own.
The Sphinx killed herself when Oedipus answered correctly.
✔ TRUE
Apollodorus says she threw herself from the citadel, and vase paintings and later writers agree that the right answer was the end of her.
The Greek Sphinx had wings.
✔ TRUE
Apollodorus gives her a woman's face, a lion's breast, feet and tail, and the wings of a bird. Greek sculptors put winged sphinxes on top of columns and grave markers.
The answer to the Sphinx's riddle is a human being.
✔ TRUE
A baby crawls on four limbs, an adult walks on two legs and an old person leans on a stick as a third.
🕯️ Quotes
“What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”
“Oedipus found the solution, declaring that the riddle of the Sphinx referred to man; for as a babe he is four-footed, going on four limbs, as an adult he is two-footed, and as an old man he gets besides a third support in a staff.”
Lines come only from public-domain texts.
🃏 Stat Card
⚡ Powers
- A riddle learned from the Muses
- A lion's claws and a bird's wings
- A city held hostage from a single rock
- Patience: she can wait for the next traveller
🧄 Weaknesses
- A correct answer
- A clever stranger with a limp
- Pride, which makes losing a riddle fatal
- Having only one riddle
Stats power the Monster Mash: terminal-of-terror mash sphinx
🎞️ Legacy
- Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE), which Aristotle thought the model tragedy
- Ingres's painting Oedipus and the Sphinx (1808) and Gustave Moreau's (1864)
- Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex, named after the man who beat her
- The riddling Sphinx in the Triwizard maze in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)
- The quiz-show Sphinx in Rick Riordan's The Battle of the Labyrinth (2008)
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