The riddle of the Sphinx

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Oedipus and the Sphinx - The scene depicts the meeting of both in solving the riddle. (Painting on a kylix , c. 440 BC, now in the Louvre)

The Riddle of the Sphinx is an episode from the Oedipus saga of Greek mythology . The besieged Sphinx the city of Thebes , and gave the Thebans over next riddle on. Anyone who answered incorrectly was eaten. Only Oedipus could escape her.

Oedipus

The riddle that the Sphinx posed to man, and that Oedipus was able to solve, was:

“It is four-legged in the morning, two-legged at noon, and three-legged in the evening. Of all creatures it changes only with the number of its feet; but when it moves most of the feet, the strength and speed of its limbs are the least. "

Oedipus' correct answer was:

“You mean the person who crawls on two feet and two hands in the morning of his life while he is a child. If he has become strong, he walks on two feet at noon of his life, at the end of his life, as an old man, he needs support and uses the staff as a third foot. "

- after Gustav Schwab

With this, Oedipus was the only one to escape the monster , which fell into its death out of shame and despair. For his liberation Thebes from the Sphinx, he got Iocaste , the widow of King Laios , as his wife and ruled with her over Thebes - without knowing that Iocaste was his own mother and the dead king was his own Years ago, the father killed in an argument acted. Thus Oedipus recognized the riddle of the Sphinx, but the real riddle of his own existence remained hidden from him, as the seer Teiresias accuses him of in Sophocles ' drama King Oedipus :

"You look around and don't see where you stand in the bad,
not where you live and not who you live with -
'Do you know who you are from?"

- Sophocles : King Oedipus

Another transmitted riddle

Another traditional riddle of the Sphinx was:

"Who are the two sisters who always generate each other?"

The answer was: “day and night”, both of which were personified in Greek as female figures.

Comments

The French Literature - Nobel Prize -carrier André Gide said:

"No matter what the Sphinx would have asked me, I would always have said: The human being, because it is the human being around whom all puzzles revolve!"

Proof of citation

  1. ↑ Sagas of classical antiquity , Insel Verlag, 1838 (accessed on March 10, 2013)
  2. ↑ Quotation from Gustav Schwab: The most beautiful sagas of classical antiquity , Stuttgart: Reclam 1986, p. 259
  3. ↑ Sophocles : King Oedipus , v. 416-418, quoted in n. Sophocles: The tragedies , trans. by Wolfgang Schadewaldt , Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer 1963, p. 155
  4. ↑ Eric M. Moormann, Wilfried Uitterhoeve: Lexicon of ancient figures. With their continued life in art, poetry and music (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 468). Kröner, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-520-46801-8 , p. 504.
  5. ↑ Christoph Drösser, NZZ: A Brief History of Brooding (December 2007; accessed on July 9, 2009)

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