The Myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx

At a Glance

• Central figures: Oedipus, prince of Thebes raised in Corinth; the Sphinx, a winged monster posted at the gates of Thebes; King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, his true parents.
• Setting: Ancient Thebes and its surrounding roads; the oracle’s seat at Delphi; the encounter with the Sphinx takes place at a rocky outcrop outside the city gates.
• The turn: The Sphinx challenges Oedipus with her riddle - the same riddle that has devoured every traveler before him - and Oedipus answers it correctly.
• The outcome: The Sphinx destroys herself; Oedipus is made king of Thebes and marries the widowed Jocasta, his own mother, fulfilling the prophecy he had fled Corinth to escape. Years later he blinds himself and goes into exile when the truth is revealed.
• The legacy: The riddle of the Sphinx - what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening - became the best-known riddle in the Greek tradition, and Oedipus’s name attached permanently to the archetype of the man whose intelligence destroys him.

The Oracle at Delphi told Laius, king of Thebes, that his own son would kill him and take his wife to bed. Laius’s response was practical: he had the newborn’s feet bound and handed the child to a shepherd with orders to leave it on the mountainside to die. The shepherd did not obey. He passed the infant to another man, who carried it to Corinth, where the childless royal couple took the boy and named him Oedipus - swollen foot - for the marks the binding had left.

Oedipus grew up in Corinth believing himself the son of its king and queen. Then someone at a feast told him the truth, or part of it, and he went to Delphi himself and heard from Apollo’s priestess that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. He did not wait to ask more questions. He left Corinth that same day and did not go back.

The Road from Corinth

The road he chose ran toward Thebes, though he did not know it. At a narrow crossroads - one of those tight passes where three roads meet and there is no room for two parties to pass without one yielding - his path crossed that of an old man in a chariot. There was a quarrel over right of way. It escalated. Oedipus killed the old man and his attendants and walked on. The old man was Laius. The first part of the prophecy was fulfilled on a dusty road before Oedipus had ever seen the city his father ruled.

He came to Thebes and found it in crisis. A Sphinx had taken up a position on a rocky height at the approach to the city - a creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and a serpent’s tail - and no one could enter or leave without being put to the riddle. Get it right and you passed. Get it wrong and the Sphinx ate you. Since the riddle had so far consumed every traveler who tried it, the roads into Thebes were effectively closed. King Laius, men said, had gone off to consult an oracle about the Sphinx and never returned. The city was paralyzed, mourning its king, starving by inches.

The Riddle at the Gates

Oedipus walked up to the Sphinx and took the riddle.

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

He answered without long deliberation: man - a baby on hands and knees, an adult upright, an old man with a cane. The stages of a human life, fitted into a single day. Simple, if you saw it. Apparently no one had.

The Sphinx did not survive the answer. In most tellings she threw herself from her rocky perch and was broken on the stones below. In a few versions she simply vanished. Either way she was gone, the road into Thebes lay open, and the people who poured out to see what had happened found a stranger standing where the monster had been.

The Throne of Thebes

Thebes did not waste time on gratitude - it acted. The city needed a king. Laius was dead, the Sphinx was dead, and here was this capable man who had done what everyone else had failed to do. The council offered Oedipus the throne and the hand of Jocasta, the widowed queen. He accepted. He had no reason not to. He was a king’s son from Corinth, as far as he knew, and Jocasta was a stranger to him, a woman he had never set eyes on before.

They married. They had four children - Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone, Ismene. Oedipus ruled Thebes for years, and by most accounts ruled it well. The city prospered. The prophecy he had run from seemed to belong to some other life, some life in Corinth he had put behind him.

The Plague and the Investigation

Then the plague came. Crops failed. People died in numbers that could not be explained by ordinary disease. Oedipus sent his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi to ask Apollo what was wrong, and Creon came back with the answer: Thebes was harboring a polluted man, the killer of King Laius, and until he was driven out the city would not recover.

Oedipus launched an investigation with the same directness he had brought to the Sphinx’s riddle. He questioned witnesses. He sent for Tiresias, the blind prophet, who told him things he refused to hear. He interrogated the surviving attendant from the crossroads. He sent to Corinth when a messenger arrived with word that the king there had died - only to learn from that same messenger that Oedipus had been a foundling, adopted, not a blood son of Corinth at all.

Every thread he pulled unraveled further. The shepherd who had not abandoned him on the mountainside. The binding on his feet. The crossroads where an old man had died at his hands.

When the full shape of it became clear - that he was Laius’s son, that the man he had killed at the crossroads was his father, that the woman he had married and had children with was his mother - Jocasta understood first. She went inside and hanged herself. Oedipus found her and took the long pins from her dress and drove them into his own eyes.

Exile from Thebes

He asked to be sent away. Blinded, led by his daughter Antigone, he left the city he had saved from the Sphinx and whose plague he had now cured by exposing himself. He went into exile carrying nothing but the knowledge of what he was.

The riddle of the Sphinx asks what creature begins on four limbs, rises to two, and ends on three. Oedipus answered it correctly and could not apply it to himself - could not see that he was the creature the riddle described, moving through the morning of infancy, the noon of a king’s power, and the evening of a blind man groping with a staff through foreign roads. The answer was always man. The answer was always him.