Oedipus and the Sphinx

At a Glance

• Central figures: Oedipus, the exiled prince of Thebes; the Sphinx, a winged creature with a lion’s body and a woman’s face sent to terrorize the city; and Queen Jocasta, widow of the slain King Laius.
• Setting: The city of Thebes and the mountain pass outside it, in the age of the Greek heroic myths; the story forms a central episode in the broader legend of Oedipus.
• The turn: The Sphinx poses her riddle to Oedipus, and he answers correctly - the first traveler ever to do so - destroying her and freeing Thebes.
• The outcome: Oedipus is made king of Thebes and given Jocasta as his wife, unknowingly fulfilling the Oracle’s prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother.
• The legacy: Thebes was freed from the Sphinx’s terror, but the same act that saved the city placed Oedipus on the throne where the full weight of the prophecy would eventually crush him.

A creature had settled on the mountain outside Thebes - lion-bodied, eagle-winged, and wearing the face of a woman - and the city had been dying around her riddle for years. No traveler who met the Sphinx on the road walked away from her. Those who could not answer were killed and eaten. Those who tried to avoid the road did not reach Thebes at all. King Laius was dead, the throne empty, and the people of Thebes had learned to keep behind their walls and wait.

Oedipus arrived on that road not knowing it was his city, not knowing it was his throne, and not yet knowing what he had already done.

The Prophecy and the Crossroads

Oedipus was born in Thebes to King Laius and Queen Jocasta. The Oracle had spoken before his birth: the child would kill his father and marry his mother. Laius had the infant taken to a hillside and left to die, his ankles pinned together. The shepherd charged with the task gave the baby instead to a messenger from Corinth, and Oedipus grew up in the Corinthian court believing that the king and queen there were his parents.

When he was old enough to seek the Oracle himself, the prophecy came back to him unchanged. He would kill his father. He would marry his mother. He fled Corinth at once, heading away from the people he loved, certain that distance was enough to cheat fate.

At a crossroads where three roads met, Oedipus encountered a party of travelers - an older man riding in a chariot, attended by servants who demanded he clear the road. There was a confrontation. Words became blows. Oedipus killed the old man and most of his retinue. He did not know the man’s name. He continued toward Thebes.

The old man was Laius, king of Thebes, his father.

The Sphinx on the Mountain

The Sphinx had been placed outside Thebes by the gods - Hera, some accounts say, or Apollo - as a punishment against the city. She perched on the rock above the road and posed the same riddle to every traveler who passed. No one had answered it. The bones of those who had failed lay at the base of the mountain.

Her riddle ran:

What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?

It had stopped soldiers, philosophers, and kings. Thebes, already staggering under the loss of Laius, had no answer. The Sphinx was patient. She had time. And the city’s roads remained blocked, its trade strangled, its people too afraid to travel.

Oedipus came up the road alone and the Sphinx descended.

The Answer

She put the riddle to him. Oedipus did not hesitate. He spoke his answer plainly:

Man. He crawls on all fours as an infant, walks upright as an adult, and leans on a staff in old age.

The Sphinx had waited through the deaths of many men for this moment. It did not go as she had expected. Oedipus had named the thing she guarded, and by naming it, broken her power over it. Some versions of the story say she threw herself from the cliff. Others say she simply vanished. In every version, she was gone. The road to Thebes was open.

Oedipus walked through the gates of a city that was already his by blood, though no one there knew it yet - not even him.

The Throne and the Queen

A city without a king and without a Sphinx needs a king quickly. The Thebans had their deliverer standing in front of them. They offered Oedipus the throne of Laius, and with it, as was customary for a widowed queen’s new husband, they offered him Jocasta.

He accepted both.

For a time, Thebes recovered. Oedipus was a good king - direct, decisive, willing to pursue hard truths. He and Jocasta had children together. The city prospered. The prophecy that Oedipus had run from in terror seemed to have come to nothing. He had killed a stranger at a crossroads, not his father. He had married a queen, not his mother.

Except he had. Every word the Oracle had spoken was already accomplished. The full weight of it simply had not fallen yet.

The Plague and the Revelation

Years later, plague came to Thebes. Crops failed. Livestock died. Jocasta miscarried. The Oracle was consulted and returned the same answer: the city harbored a pollution, the murderer of Laius walked unpunished among the living, and until he was found and expelled, the plague would not lift.

Oedipus took up the investigation himself, driving it forward with the same bluntness he had always shown. Witnesses were summoned. The blind prophet Tiresias was dragged in and made to speak, and he spoke unwillingly and said what no one wanted to hear. A single surviving servant of Laius, the one man who had escaped the crossroads, was brought to court. Jocasta recognized details from her first husband’s death that matched what Oedipus had described from his road from Corinth. A messenger from Corinth arrived to say the old king was dead and Oedipus was therefore free to return home - and then confirmed, under questioning, that Oedipus had not been born there at all.

The shepherd who had been ordered to expose the infant on the hillside was still alive. He confirmed everything.

Jocasta had understood the truth before Oedipus did. She was already dead by the time the full shape of it reached him - hanged in the palace. Oedipus took the brooches from her robe and drove them into his own eyes.

He left Thebes blind, led by his daughters, exiled from the city he had saved. The riddle of the Sphinx had asked what a man was. Oedipus had answered it correctly. He had not understood that knowing the answer and knowing what it cost were two entirely different things.