Who defeated the Sphinx in Greek mythology?
The Sphinx in Greek mythology was defeated by Oedipus when he solved her notorious riddle. After he answered the riddle correctly, the Sphinx either took her own life or vanished, thus lifting the plague that had gripped Thebes.
What are the three Sphinx riddles?
It is unknown if there were three riddles of the Sphinx, which were designed to stump travelers wanting to pass into Thebes. There may have been more or fewer than three. The most well-known of her riddles asks, “What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?”
Where does the Sphinx live in Greek mythology?
The Sphinx in Greek mythology lives in the area surrounding Thebes, near cliffs and caves.
When did the Sphinx first appear in Greek mythology?
The Sphinx first appeared in Greek mythology in the works of Hesiod around the 7th century BCE.
Why is the Sphinx important in Greek mythology?
The Sphinx is important in Greek mythology because she shows how tricky knowledge and fate can be. She guards old secrets and tests people with hard riddles, hinting at what’s coming for those brave enough to face her.
How tall is the Sphinx in Greek mythology?
The Sphinx in Greek mythology is often depicted as a colossal being, her towering form symbolizing the vast, intimidating unknown that looms over mortal existence.
Table of Contents
Family, Origins, and Mythological Background
The Greek Sphinx emerged from a complex lineage of monstrous beings that populated the ancient mythological landscape. Most accounts identify her as the offspring of the fearsome monsters Echidna and Typhon, making her the sibling of other notorious creatures, such as the Nemean Lion, Cerberus, and the Chimera. This terrifying parentage established the Sphinx as a creature of chaos, existing at the boundaries between the orderly human world and the mysterious realm of monsters.
Unlike her siblings, who mainly presented physical threats, the Sphinx wielded intellectual terror through her deadly riddles. According to Hesiod’s accounts, Hera sent her as a punishment to the city of Thebes, either because of King Laius’s transgressions or as part of the broader curse on the house of Cadmus, Thebes’ founder.
She had a woman’s face and bust, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird, according to Apollodorus. Basically, she looked like a griffin but with a woman’s face instead of an eagle’s.
The Greek Sphinx differs significantly from her Egyptian counterpart, despite sharing a similar hybrid form. Characteristically male rather than female, the Egyptian Sphinx has a human head (often depicting a pharaoh) on a lion’s body, lacking the wings of the Greek version. The Egyptian Sphinx, most famously embodied in the Great Sphinx of Giza, served primarily as a guardian figure representing royal power and divine protection.
In Greek mythology, the Sphinx took on a distinctly predatory role. Rather than protecting sacred spaces, she terrorized the region around Thebes, strangling and devouring travelers who failed to answer her riddle correctly. This shift from guardian to tormentor reflects the Greek tendency to reinterpret foreign deities and symbols through their cultural lens.
Historians believe the Greeks borrowed their story of the Sphinx from Egypt by way of the Phoenicians.[1] This transmission through Phoenician trade and cultural exchange transformed the sphinx from a protective guardian to the riddling monster of Greek legend.
The Riddle of the Sphinx
The Sphinx’s famous riddle stands as one of the most enduring puzzles in Western culture: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” This seemingly simple question proved fatal to countless travelers who encountered the monster on the road to Thebes.
The riddle’s power lay in its metaphorical language. “Morning,” “noon,” and “evening” refer not to times of day but to the stages of human life. Only Oedipus recognized this metaphorical dimension, providing the answer: “Man.” As Oedipus explained, humans crawl on all fours as infants (morning), walk upright on two legs as adults (noon), and rely on a walking stick as a third “leg” in old age (evening).
This riddle encapsulated ancient Greek understanding of the human condition—our fundamental vulnerability as we progress through life’s stages. The riddle’s focus on physical transformation reflects the Greek preoccupation with mortality and the inevitable decline of human strength and independence.
The symbolic meaning of the riddle extends beyond its literal answer. The Sphinx’s question challenges humans to recognize their nature and limitations. By focusing on walking—the most basic human mobility—the riddle strips away all social distinctions, wealth, and power to reveal our shared biological reality. Kings and paupers alike crawl as babies and stumble as elders.
The riddle also functioned as a test of wisdom rather than mere cleverness. It required the solver to step back from literal thinking and recognize the metaphorical nature of the question—a cognitive leap that separated the truly wise from the merely educated.
The Sphinx and Oedipus
The confrontation between Oedipus and the Sphinx occurs at a critical juncture in the mythic narrative. Thebes was suffering under the Sphinx’s reign of terror, with the monster seizing travelers along the road to the city and devouring those who failed her test. According to some versions, King Creon had promised both the throne of Thebes and the hand of Queen Jocasta to anyone who could rid the city of this menace.
Oedipus, a stranger to Thebes, arrived at this desperate moment. Unknown to him, he had already fulfilled part of a terrible prophecy by killing his father, King Laius, in a roadside dispute. Now, standing before the Sphinx, Oedipus faced a test that would lead him unwittingly toward completing the rest of the prophecy.
When confronted with the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus demonstrates his exceptional intellect by immediately recognizing its metaphorical nature. His swift and confident answer—“Man”—caught the Sphinx by surprise. Never before had anyone solved her puzzle.
The Sphinx’s reaction to Oedipus’s correct answer varies across different versions of the myth. In the most common version described by Sophocles, the defeated Sphinx threw herself from the high rock where she had perched, plunging to her death by the rules of her own deadly game. Other accounts suggest she simply vanished or that Oedipus killed her after solving the riddle.
Oedipus’s victory had profound consequences. Free from the Sphinx’s threat, Thebes welcomed him as a savior. True to Creon’s promise, Oedipus received both the throne and marriage to Jocasta—not knowing she was his birth mother. This victory, while seemingly triumphant, actually propelled Oedipus toward his tragic destiny.
The irony of Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx lies in its connection to self-knowledge. While clever enough to solve the riddle about the nature of humanity, Oedipus remains ignorant of his own identity and origins. His defeat of the Sphinx, rather than representing complete wisdom, highlighted the limitations of human knowledge—particularly regarding ourselves.
Symbolism and Interpretations
At her most basic level, the Sphinx represents the mysterious and often dangerous power of knowledge. Her hybrid form—part woman, part lion, part bird—symbolizes how wisdom crosses boundaries between different realms of existence.
For the ancient Greeks, the Sphinx embodied the perilous aspect of wisdom. While knowledge brings power, it can also lead to destruction when misapplied or when humans overreach their natural limitations. The Sphinx’s deadly riddle game illustrates how wisdom without compassion becomes monstrous.
Riddles held special significance in ancient Greek culture, connecting to both prophecy and divination. Unlike straightforward questions, riddles require lateral thinking and reveal hidden truths through metaphor.
The Delphic Oracle famously delivered prophecies in similarly ambiguous language, requiring interpretation rather than mere comprehension. The Sphinx’s riddle thus aligned her with other prophetic goddesses in Greek tradition.
In psychological interpretations, particularly Freudian analysis, the Sphinx represents the “maternal enigma”—the mysterious nature of femininity from the perspective of the male psyche. Her defeat by Oedipus becomes part of his psychological development, representing masculine intellect’s attempt to master feminine mystery.
This interpretation is supported by the fact that her visage is not as hideous as some of the uglier monsters of Greek mythology, such as the Cyclops or Medusa. Her impossible riddles, therefore, represent the improbability and mystery of such a cruel, fearsome but beautiful and feminine creature.[2] This complexity reflects how the Sphinx served as both antagonist and instrument of fate in Oedipus’ story.
Philosophical interpretations often interpret the Sphinx as embodying life’s fundamental questions. Her riddle about human development forces a confrontation with mortality and the transient nature of human existence. By requiring Oedipus to contemplate the full human lifespan, she challenges him—and by extension all humans—to acknowledge our temporary nature.
The Sphinx also represents fate’s inescapability within Greek mythological thinking. Despite her defeat, she ultimately serves as an instrument in Oedipus’s predetermined tragic journey. His victory over her knowledge test ironically blinds him to the greater knowledge he lacks—his own identity.
The Sphinx in Art and Literature
In classical Greek pottery, the Sphinx often appears in two contexts: either directly confronting Oedipus or as a decorative motif symbolizing mystery and fate. Red-figure vases frequently show the moment of the riddle contest, with the Sphinx perched on a column facing Oedipus. These visual representations typically emphasize the Sphinx’s composite form—the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird—highlighting her nature as a creature between categories.
Sophocles’ tragic play Oedipus Rex, composed around 429 BCE, remains the most influential literary treatment of the Sphinx myth. Though the Sphinx herself never appears on stage, her presence looms large in the narrative as the catalyst for Oedipus’s rise to power. Sophocles uses the Sphinx and her riddle as a metaphor for the larger mystery that Oedipus must solve—the truth of his own identity.
Beyond ancient Greece, the Sphinx inspired artists throughout the Western tradition.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the nineteenth-century French Neoclassical painter, created multiple works featuring the Greek Sphinx. His 1808 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx dramatically depicts Oedipus confidently confronting the creature, embodying the Enlightenment ideal of human reason triumphing over superstition. Ingres returned to the subject in 1827 with a revised version that heightened the psychological tension between the two figures.
The Sphinx’s influence extends into modern literature, in which writers have reinterpreted her symbolism for contemporary audiences.
Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx,” a poem published in 1894, reimagines the creature as an emblem of decadent mystery and forbidden knowledge. Writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Muriel Rukeyser, and Anne Sexton have similarly used the Sphinx as a symbol for exploring questions of gender, knowledge, and power.
In cinema, the Sphinx frequently appears as a symbol of enigmatic femininity and dangerous knowledge. The experimental feminist film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) used the myth to explore women’s position in patriarchal culture.[3]
Through many mediums, the Sphinx continues to represent psychological complexity and the questioning of established frameworks.
The Enduring Mystery of the Sphinx
The Greek Sphinx continues to captivate our imagination thousands of years after her first appearance in mythology. Her enduring appeal lies not just in her striking hybrid form but in the profound questions she embodies about human knowledge, identity, and mortality.
Her riddle condenses the entire human lifespan into a single puzzling question, reminding us of our vulnerability at life’s beginning and end. In a world increasingly aware of how traditional categories often fail to capture human complexity, the Sphinx represents the power of existing between established definitions.
Perhaps most importantly, the Sphinx reminds us that knowledge has consequences and challenges us to consider not just what we can know, but what we should know, and how we might bear the responsibility that knowledge brings.
References
- Katz, Joshua T. 2005. ‘The Riddle of the’sp (h) ij-’: The Greek Sphinx and Her Indic and Indo-European Background.” Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics Paper 120505. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1426852.
- Lauriola, Rosanna. 2011. “Revivals of an Ancient Myth in Modern Art: Oedipus and the episode of the Sphinx. From Jean Auguste-Domenique Ingres to Michael Merck.” Trends in Classics 3, no. 1(2011):154–194. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/tcs.2011.008/html.
- Mulvey, Laura. 1991. “The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx.” In: Donald, J. (eds) Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, 27–50. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-21170-8_3.