Sphinx

A winged female monster with the face and breasts of a woman and the body of a lion, who sat on Mount Phicium above Thebes after Laius's death and devoured anyone who could not solve her riddle: 'What is that which has one voice, and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?' (Apollodorus *Bibliotheca* 3.5.8). Her parentage is contested. Hesiod *Theogony* 326–327 (ἣ δ᾽ ἄρα Φῖκ᾽ ὀλοὴν τέκε Καδμείοισιν ὄλεθρον / Ὅρθῳ ὑποδμηθεῖσα, 'she then bore the deadly Phix, a ruin to the Cadmeans, subdued by Orthus') names Orthus (Geryon's hound) as the father, but the pronominal antecedent ἣ δ᾽ is disputed — the standard modern editions (West OCT, Most Loeb, Evelyn-White) take the subject as Echidna, a minority reading takes it as Chimaera. Apollodorus 3.5.8 gives the canonical-prose genealogy outright, Typhon and Echidna, fitting her into the Typhonid monster-brood alongside Cerberus, the Hydra, and Chimaera. Oedipus, arriving at Thebes from the west, answered her riddle — Man, the creature that crawls on four in infancy, walks on two in his prime, and leans on a staff in age — and she threw herself from her rock onto the plain below. Her name in the older epic (the lost *Oidipodeia*) was Phix; Sphinx is the Attic form.

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