A monster with a question
In the Library, Hera sends the Sphinx against Thebes. The compiler identifies her as a child of Echidna and Typhon, with a woman’s face, a lion’s body, and a bird’s wings. She occupies a height and confronts the Thebans with a riddle learned from the Muses. The question concerns a creature with one voice that changes the number of feet it uses. A wrong answer brings death. The threat is therefore intellectual and bodily at once: knowledge is demanded under conditions that make failed interpretation immediately fatal.
Source: Library and Epitome · Library 3.5.8
The answer is human life
After repeated losses, Creon offers the kingdom and the widow Jocasta to whoever solves the riddle. Oedipus identifies the creature as a human being: crawling early in life, walking on two feet in maturity, and using a staff in old age. The Sphinx throws herself down, and Oedipus receives the promised rewards. The solution views life as a sequence of changing capacities rather than a stable adult condition. It also produces a dangerous contrast. Oedipus can recognize the general pattern of a human lifetime while remaining ignorant of the family relationships that will make his own marriage disastrous.
Source: Library and Epitome · Library 3.5.8–9
One sphinx is not every sphinx
This Greek narrative figure should not stand for all the sphinxes represented in ancient Mediterranean art. The selected text describes the particular antagonist at Thebes; it does not explain the meanings of Egyptian royal sphinxes or establish that one story was borrowed directly from another culture. Even within Greek tradition the figure’s parentage is not uniform: Hesiod places the Phix, another form of the name, in his genealogy of monsters with Orthus as the father and an ambiguously referred-to mother. The Library supplies a later, more explicit parentage. Image type, genealogy, and the narrative role of a riddle-giver are related questions, but they require separate evidence.
Sources: Library and Epitome; Theogony, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica · Library 3.5.8; Theogony 326–332
- Period / witness
- Greek mythographic compilation, probably first or second century CE; Frazer translation 1921
- Recording context
- The Library attributed to Apollodorus survives through medieval manuscripts; its lost ending is known through epitomes. This later compilation preserves earlier traditions without dating their beginnings.
A recording location is not necessarily a story’s origin. Dates of texts, copies, and translations answer different questions.
Explore time & place →Read the sources
These references support the explanation above. Rights and edition notes are recorded individually.
Library and Epitome ↗
Pseudo-Apollodorus (ancient author uncertain); translated by Sir James George Frazer · Greek compilation probably first or second century CE; ending survives through later epitomes; Frazer translation 1921; host text page dated 2026-10-05
Edition & rights noteTheogony, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica ↗
Hesiod; translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White · Ancient poem conventionally dated around 700 BCE; translation 1914; digital edition updated 2020
Edition & rights note