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The Sphinx | |
In a popular Theban myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, the Sphinx sits at the entrance to Thebes, poses this question to travelers and devours them if they do not answer correctly. Oedipus visits Thebes and solves the riddle, telling the sphinx, "man crawls as a child, walks upright as an adult, and supports himself with a stick as an old man."(1) According to one version of the myth, when the riddle had been solved the sphinx killed herself by leaping off of her perch.(2) This Theban myth, initiated by Sophocles in the 5 th century BCE and possibly earlier by Hesiod in the 7 th century BCE, does not mark the introduction of the sphinx to Greece, but is one of the earliest literary references. The sphinx, in the form of a winged lion with a female head, is found earlier on Minoan and Mycenaean seals, vases, and bronzes. The sphinx image virtually disappears after the Mycenaean period and then resurfaces during the Geometric and Orientalizing periods when Greece is exposed to the Near East and Egypt through trade.(3)
Most Eastern sphinxes seem to derive from the Egyptian sphinx, which has the body of a lion and the head of a human. The Syrians and Hittites adopted the form of the sphinx in their art, and added wings.(4) They typically represented the sphinx as a male, and occasionally as a female. Phoenician ivory carvers depicted the sphinx often. They depicted the sphinx as a female, and were influenced by Egyptian styles.(5) The Greeks depicted the sphinx as both a male and a female, with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle.
Scholars do not agree on the answer to this question, and it seems that the sphinx meant different things to the Greeks at different periods in history. Protocorinthian (720 - 630 BCE) and Corinthian (630 - 550 BCE) painters use the sphinx as a decorative element in animal friezes or individually on the body of the vase. According to Jeffrey M. Hurwitt, "the Orientalizing "animal style" is an elegant diversion, rendering even the beasts of the imagination harmless through rhythm and repetition."(6) During the Protoattic period, which begins around 700 BCE, Attica is importing a considerable amount of Corinthian pottery and is getting Oriental motifs second hand from Corinth. However, Attic painters gradually portray figures with more life and agency, the ability to move and act, rather than as simple decoration.(7) Attic painters depict the sphinx by the beginning of the 7 th century BCE in processions, framing figures, and interacting with animals and humans in a scene. Over time the sphinx becomes a part of narrative painting on pottery.(8) It seems that during this early revival of the sphinx it serves as decoration, and possibly as an apotropaic figure, warding off evil.
As with other hybrid creatures adopted from the East, the Greek sphinx begins to take on varied and often ambiguous roles. There are several different, possibly narrative, scenarios depicting the sphinx in the 7 th through 5 th centuries BCE.
The first images of the female sphinx hovering over or carrying a passive male body appear during the 7 th century BCE.(9) A fragment of a vase by the Eucharides painterdepicts a boy suspended by a sphinx. It has been proposed that this represents the sphinx carrying off her victim. Another possible explanation is that the sphinx acts as a "mediator between worlds."(10) She is not human and not animal, but something in-between. She may not be the cause of death, but carries the body between life and the death. "In some sense there is no agent of death for the Greeks, because death is not a power - so Hades and Thanatos are notoriously unworshipped; death is a negative, a cessation, an inversion of life, but not a physical enemy."(11)
The sphinx is more directly connected with death as she appears as a sculpture, surmounting an Attic grave stela, or painted atop stelae or grave mounds on Greek vases. An example of this is given on an Attic red-figure krater made around 500-490B.C.E. These depictions of the sphinx are more commonly found on lekythoi, which are often associated with grave goods and funeral ritual.(12)
The sphinx is also portrayed chasing male youths. It is not clear whether this is the beginning of the narrative that ends with her carrying off a body, or whether this scene has some entirely separate meaning. Is she chasing the youths because she wants to kill them, or rather because she has erotic intentions?(13) Emily Vermeule relates the obviously erotic nature of the images of the sphinx with a limp male youth to the sphinx's relationship with death by noting the connection in Greek poetry between sex and death. She describes Hypnos (Sleep), who along with Thanatos (Death) carries the dead.
Sleep was a release. He is sweet, pleasure-giving, honey hearted, soft, ambrosial like Night, warm. ... This blinding and softening side of Sleep accentuates his brotherhood with Death, as he is shed on a man like a liquid, a mist, or a cloud of death; he can run a man down, snatch him and catch him, hold him, master him in softness, and undo his legs. He can transport a man to a different and necessary state, to bed or beyond.(14)
The ambiguity of these scenes that could represent death or could represent sex, which in turn implies procreation and life, is reflected in the sphinx herself. She is something in-between the real and the supernatural, comprehensible and incomprehensible, and possibly represents an attempt by the Greeks to grapple with the distinctions between life and death. The Psyche, portrayed on Greek vases as a sort of hovering fairy, is the last spark of life for the dead because it has the power to remember and possibly to feel emotion.(15) Is it possible that the sphinx represents a last hope, a last breath, for the dead or dying youth and the possibility of immortality?(16) The image of the sphinx has traveled a long distance between Egypt and Greece. "In Egyptian myth the Sphinx was an aspect of the rising Sun and called Hor-em-Akhet, 'Horus of the Horizon.'" (17) Though the Greeks have a much different perception of death than the Egyptians, it is interesting to compare how the two cultures use the same motif in different ways to relate to death.
The image of Oedipus and the Sphinx did not become popular until the 5 th century BCE, and its increase in popularity could be related to Aeschylus' satyr-play "Sphinx," which is dated to 467 BCE. (18) As guardian of the gate at Thebes the sphinx is still associated with death, whether that of the travelers that are unsuccessful at answering her riddle, or her own fall after Oedipus answers the riddle. She is once again marking a liminal and ambiguous situation; the traveler either passes from life to death or is given a second chance at life. (19)
Author: Gina Hander
(1) Despoina Tsiafakis, "Fabulous Creatures and/or Demons of Death?," in The Centaur's Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art , ed. J. Michael Padgett (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum 2004):79.
(2) Harry Thurston Peck, "Sphinx," Perseus Digital Library Project , Accessed 12 March, 2005, available from:http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0062&query=figure%3D1999.04.0062.fig01486_2.
(3) Tsiafakis, The Centaur's Smile, 79.
(5) J. Michael Padgett, ed., The Centaur's Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum, 2004):268.
(6) Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 BCE (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985):131.
(8) Elizabeth Langridge-Noti, "Mourning at the Tomb: A Re-evaluation of the Sphinx Monument on Attic Black Figure Pottery," Archaologischer Anzeiger , 1 Halbband, (2003):146.
(9) Tsiafakis, The Centaur's Smile, 80.
(11) Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press 1979):37.
(12) Langridge-Noti, Archaologischer Anzeiger , 142-143.
(13) Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry , 171.
(17) Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld y de la Torre, M.A., ed ., " The Evolution of Iron Age Proto-Aeolic Pillar Capitals in the Ancient Near East from Egyptian Lotus-Papyrus Pillar Exemplars," Accessed 25 March, 2005, available from: http://www.bibleorigins.net/LotusTreeadoredpillarMegiddo.html.
(18) Padgett, The Centaur's Smile, 262.
(19) Tsiafakis, The Centaur's Smile, 82.
