The Sphinx

The Greek Sphinx is not the Egyptian one, and the differences matter. Egypt's is male, benign, and enormous; Greece's is female, winged, lion-bodied, and murderous. Another child of Typhon and Echidna in most accounts, she was sent by Hera — or by Ares, depending on the source — to punish the city of Thebes for an old crime nobody had answered for.

She sat on a rock outside the city and would not let travellers pass without answering a riddle. What goes on four legs in the morning, two at midday, and three in the evening? Everyone who failed was strangled and eaten. The word sphinx comes from a Greek verb meaning to squeeze or throttle, so the method is embedded in the name.

Oedipus answered: a human being, crawling as an infant, walking upright as an adult, leaning on a stick in old age. The answer is not clever so much as unflattering — it requires looking directly at your own decline. Some versions add a second riddle about two sisters who give birth to each other, day and night.

Beaten, the Sphinx threw herself from her rock and died. That is the strangest part of the story: the monster is not killed, she is answered, and the answering is fatal to her. Thebes made Oedipus king for it, which set in motion everything that happens to him afterwards.

She is the only Greek monster whose weapon is a question, and the only one who dies of losing an argument. Later art keeps returning to her because a lion with a thoughtful face is a genuinely unsettling image — she is not hunting, she is waiting for you to speak.