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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe Greek Sphinx is a winged, woman-faced lion who preys on Thebes until Oedipus answers her riddle about a human lifetime.
Also recorded as Sphinx of Thebes, Σφίγξ
The Thebans meet to discuss the Sphinx’s question, but discussion saves no one. In the Library, each failure allows her to seize another victim. After his own son is taken, Creon offers the kingdom to anyone who can answer. The man who arrives has a question of his own: who were his parents? [1]
Read the manuscriptThe Sphinx of Thebes combines a woman’s face, a lion’s breast, feet and tail, and a bird’s wings. In the ancient narrative collection known as the Library, she is sent by Hera and learns her riddle from the Muses. The question is not an invitation to a harmless game. Failure exposes the city’s inhabitants to a creature who eats them. [1]
The Library’s Oedipus begins life as the child his father is determined not to keep. An oracle has warned Laius that a son will kill him. When the boy is born, the king pierces his ankles and gives him to a herdsman to abandon. Cattle herders belonging to Polybus, king of Corinth, find the infant and carry him to the queen, Periboea. She heals his feet and raises him as her own. The child receives the name Oedipus because of those swollen feet. [1]
As he grows, other boys taunt him about his parentage. Periboea tells him nothing, so he goes to Delphi to discover who his parents are. The answer he receives is a warning: he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Believing Polybus and Periboea to be the threatened couple, he leaves Corinth. On a narrow road in Phocis, his chariot meets that of Laius. When Oedipus will not give way, the king’s herald Polyphontes kills one of his horses. In anger, Oedipus kills both men and continues towards Thebes. [1]
There the Sphinx has already devoured many people. Creon’s son Haemon is the latest victim. The new king proclaims that whoever answers her riddle shall receive both the kingdom and the widow of Laius. Oedipus identifies the creature described by the question as a human being: four limbs carry a crawling infant; two feet carry an adult; a staff adds a third support in old age. The Sphinx casts herself down, and Thebes is delivered. [1]
Oedipus takes the throne and marries the widowed queen Jocasta, unaware that she is his mother. The Library carries his story beyond that reward. When the truth comes to light, Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus puts out his eyes. His sons fail to help him as he is expelled from Thebes, and he curses them. His daughter Antigone accompanies him to Colonus in Attica, where Theseus receives him kindly. He dies there not long afterwards. The man who arrived as a rescuer leaves dependent on the welcome of another city. [1]
Thebes lies in Boeotia, the Greek region in which the Library places the Sphinx on Mount Phicium. Her arrival follows the death of King Laius. Creon has taken over the kingdom and inherits the calamity. An oracle promises that solving the riddle will deliver the Thebans, so they gather repeatedly to work at it. Their effort is collective before a single stranger receives credit for the answer. [1]
Hesiod’s Theogony names the Sphinx among the offspring of an extraordinary family. In Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s translation, Echidna bears her after joining with Orthus; the Nemean lion follows in the same passage. The Sphinx is identified by the harm she brings to the Cadmeans, the people of Thebes. The poem does not tell the riddle there. The Library gives her different parents, Typhon and Echidna, before setting out her complete confrontation with the city. [2][1]
The title of Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King announces a later point in the story: the successful stranger is already ruling Thebes. The Sphinx never walks onto its stage. Instead, the people remember what her defeat won them, and that memory governs whom they turn to when another disaster arrives. The citizens’ memory of that crisis has become the foundation of the king’s public standing: he is the man who has already saved them once. [3]
The Library gives the Sphinx a human face without making the rest of her body human. A lion’s feet and breast support the speaker, and wings complete her form. The familiar voice comes from a being with a predator’s body. Her listener must attend to the question while knowing that an unsuccessful answer may make him the next meal. [1]
An Attic marble sphinx in the Metropolitan Museum has a seated lion body, a female face, long locks and an upcurving wing. Red, black and blue pigment survives. Carved separately from its capital, it was fixed into a socket with a metal dowel and molten lead. The support has paired spiral scrolls like a lyre and painted palmettes. Above its grave marker, the winged figure served as a guardian of the dead. Its alert stillness belongs to a memorial rather than the Theban contest. [5]
The Sphinx’s strongest weapon has an answer built into it. She asks how one being can have a single voice and changing numbers of feet. The apparent contradiction disappears when Oedipus follows a life through time. Her defeat needs no wound: when the answer is spoken, she throws herself from the citadel. Speech brings the physical killing to an end. [1]
The traveller Pausanias records a mountain associated with the Sphinx in Boeotia. One explanation makes it the base of a raiding commander. She arrives by ship at Anthedon, takes the mountain and plunders the country, until Oedipus comes from Corinth with a larger army and overwhelms her. The same landscape accommodates a military defeat as well as a lethal riddle. [4]
Pausanias’s other explanation makes the Sphinx Laius’s daughter. Her father has entrusted her with a Delphic oracle given to Cadmus and known only to kings. When her half-brothers claim the throne, she demands that they repeat the secret and kills those who cannot. Oedipus comes after learning it in a dream. Knowledge here authenticates—or defeats—a claim to inheritance. Pausanias gives this as another account, not the recovered biography of a woman proven to lie behind the monster. [4]
The riddle’s answer includes weakness at both ends of a human life. The baby needs four limbs to move; the elder leans on something beyond the body. Oedipus recognizes the sequence without recognizing the family that gave him life. His answer is correct, and the liberation of Thebes is real within the tale. The ruin comes through the reward: the marriage granted to the rescuer completes the relationship he left Corinth to avoid. The Sphinx does not trick him with a false answer. What he knows and what he does not know become entangled in the same success. [1]
Sophocles begins with people gathered at the palace altars. Plague has struck their crops, livestock and households. The priest reminds Oedipus that he saved them from the Sphinx without being taught by the citizens; now they ask him to save them again. Oedipus has already sent Creon, his wife’s brother, to Apollo’s shrine at Delphi. When Creon returns, he offers to give the report privately. Oedipus insists that everyone hear it. The king places the search for an answer before the people who depend upon him. [3]
Apollo’s command is to punish the killer of Laius. Oedipus asks why the crime was left unresolved. Creon explains that the Sphinx forced them to attend to the immediate threat instead of pursuing the obscure past. Oedipus promises to begin again. The creature’s earlier attack has delayed the inquiry; her conqueror now undertakes it. He also has a practical reason to find the murderer: whoever attacked one king might attack his successor. [3]
The blind seer Teiresias arrives led by a boy. Oedipus first appeals to him as the city’s defence, asking him to use his knowledge to save everyone. But Teiresias begs to go home. As the king presses him, refusal becomes an accusation of disloyalty, then of complicity in the killing itself. At last the seer identifies Oedipus as the murderer he is seeking. The king hears an attack on his reign. He accuses Creon of recruiting the prophet to help steal his crown. [3]
Here Oedipus brings the Sphinx into the quarrel. Where was Teiresias when the city needed deliverance from her? He had supplied no answer; Oedipus had silenced her through his own intelligence. The chorus tries to return both men to the present emergency, but Teiresias answers the king’s taunts about blindness. Oedipus can see, he says, yet cannot recognize the household in which he lives or the parents who begot him. When the seer mentions those parents, the king seizes on the word and demands to know who they are.
The chorus does not immediately abandon Oedipus when Teiresias accuses him. Its members have seen the rescue from the Sphinx; they have not seen proof of the murder charge. They hesitate to condemn the man whose ability was publicly demonstrated. Sophocles allows that uncertainty to stand after the confrontation. The remembered monster protects her conqueror’s reputation, even while the investigation approaches what his subjects least want to believe. [3]
The Library III.5.7–9 follows the encounter through its aftermath. Sophocles’s opening, Teiresias scene and following chorus show the defeated Sphinx’s place in a later crisis. Hesiod supplies genealogy; Pausanias supplies two alternative accounts. The Met’s object record identifies the Attic funerary sculpture. [1][3][2][4][5]
Pseudo-Apollodorus · Theoi Classical Texts Library · English translation of Greek · Translated by J. G. Frazer
III.5.7–9, complete; Sphinx and riddle III.5.8.
Checked 2026-10-11
Hesiod · Theoi Classical Texts Library · English translation of Greek · Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White
Theogony 270–333; Sphinx 326–327 in Evelyn-White rendering.
The parentage here follows Evelyn-White’s rendering of the passage; the underlying Greek’s disputed antecedent is not resolved by that translation.
Checked 2026-10-11
Sophocles · MIT Internet Classics Archive · English translation of Greek · Translated by F. Storr
Opening priest/Creon scenes; complete Teiresias confrontation and following chorus. Web displayed lines 36–292 and 498–877.
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-11. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑The exchange ends with another bitter use of the riddle. Oedipus complains of obscure language; Teiresias reminds him of his celebrated skill in solving it. Before leaving, the seer states the consequences plainly. The apparent stranger will prove native to Thebes, the wealthy king will become a blind wanderer with a staff, and the father of his children will also be their brother. Teiresias departs after giving Oedipus a claim that can be tested. The king has obtained the answer he forced from him and refuses to accept it. [3]
Pausanias · Theoi Classical Texts Library · English translation of Greek · Translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod
IX.26.2–4, complete.
Checked 2026-10-11
Metropolitan Museum of Art Greek and Roman Art curatorial team · Metropolitan Museum of Art · English
Object 11.185d, x; complete Overview, Artwork Details, and main photograph.
Checked 2026-10-11