The riddle proposed by the Sphinx ran in these terms: "What creature is that which moves on four feet in the morning, on two feet at noonday, and on three towards the going down of the sun?" dipus, after some consideration, answered that the creature was MAN, who creeps on the ground with hands and feet when an infant, walks upright in the vigor of manhood, and leans upon a staff in old age. Immediately the dreadful Sphinx confessed the truth of his solution by throwing herself headlong from a point of rock into the sea; her power being overthrown as soon as her secret had been detected. Thus was the Sphinx destroyed; and, according to the promise of the proclamation, for this great service to the state dipus was immediately recompensed. He was saluted King of Thebes, and married to the royal widow Jocasta. In this way it happened, but without suspicion either in himself or others, pointing to the truth, that dipus had slain his father, had ascended his father's throne, and had married his own mother.
Through a course of years all these dreadful events lay hushed in darkness; but at length a pestilence arose, and an embassy was despatched to Delphi, in order to ascertain the cause of the heavenly wrath, and the proper means of propitiating that wrath. The embassy returned to Thebes armed with a knowledge of the fatal secrets connected with dipus, but under some restraints of prudence in making a publication of what so dreadfully affected the most powerful personage in the state. Perhaps, in the whole history of human art as applied to the evolution of a poetic fable, there is nothing more exquisite than the management of this crisis by Sophocles. A natural discovery, first of all, connects dipus with the death of Laius. That discovery comes upon him with some surprise, but with no shock of fear or remorse. That he had killed a man of rank in a sudden quarrel, he had always known; that this man was now discovered to be Laius, added nothing to the reasons for regret. The affair remained as it was. It was simply a case of personal strife on the high road, and one which had really grown out of aristocratic violence in the adverse party. dipus had asserted his own rights and dignity only as all brave men would have done in an age that knew nothing of civic police.