The Sphynx is supposed to have been engendered by Typhon, and sent by
Juno to be revenged on the Thebans. It is represented with the head and
breasts of a woman, the wings of a bird, the claws of a lion, and the
rest of the body like a dog or lion. Its office they say, was to propose
dark enigmatical questions to all passers by; and, if they did not give
the explication of them,--to devour them. It made horrible ravages, as
the story goes, on a mountain near Thebes. Apollo told Creon that she
could not be vanquished, till some one had expounded her riddle. The
riddle was--_"What creature is that, which has four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three at night?"_ Oedipus expounded it, telling her it
was a man,--who when a child, creepeth on all fours; in his middle age,
walketh on two legs, and in his old age, two and a staff. This put the
Sphynx into a great rage, who, finding her riddle solved, threw herself
down and broke her neck. Among the Egyptians, the Sphynx was the symbol
of religion, by reason of the obscurity of its mysteries. And, on the
same account, the Romans placed a Sphynx in the pronaos, or porch, of
their temples. Sphynxes were used by the Egyptians, to show the
beginning of the water's rising in the Nile; with this view, as it had
the head of a woman and body of a lion, it signified that the Nile began
to swell in the months of July and August, when the sun passes through
the signs of Leo and Virgo; accordingly it was a hieroglyphic, which
taught the people the period of the most important event in the year, as
the swelling and overflowing of the Nile gave fertility to Egypt.
Accordingly they were multiplied without end, so that they were to be
seen before all their remarkable monuments.