Oedipus and the Sphinx
In brief
- A monstrous Sphinx (part woman, part lion, part bird) terrorized Thebes, killing every traveler who could not answer her riddle.
- Oedipus, a wandering stranger with no memory of his true royal birth, confronted the Sphinx and answered where every Theban before him had failed.
- Freed from the monster, Thebes crowned Oedipus king and gave him the recently widowed queen Jocasta as his wife: his own mother, unknowingly.
Outside the gates of Thebes, a monstrous creature had taken up residence on a high rock overlooking the road: the Sphinx, with the body of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She stopped every traveler who passed, posing a single riddle, and devoured on the spot anyone who failed to answer correctly.
The riddle was this: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening? Generation after generation of Thebans had failed to solve it, and the city lived under a growing shadow of fear, unable to pass freely along its own roads.
Oedipus, a stranger to Thebes who did not yet know he had been born a prince of the very city he approached, encountered the Sphinx on the road and heard her riddle like all before him. But where others had faltered, Oedipus answered without hesitation: a human being, who crawls on four limbs as an infant, walks upright on two legs in adulthood, and leans on a cane as a third leg in old age.
Defeated for the first time, the Sphinx hurled herself from her rock in despair, and the road to Thebes was open once more. The grateful city crowned Oedipus king and married him to their recently widowed queen, Jocasta: a union that seemed like a fitting reward, until it was revealed, far too late, that Jocasta was Oedipus's own mother, and the prophecy he had spent his whole life trying to escape had already come true.
