Greetings, members of CANE! As promised, I’m offering up another neat mythological puzzle for this week. As always, I want to hear from you with the right answers!  Send your answers to president@caneweb.org; one of those with the correct answer will be selected for a small prize.

This week’s puzzle is prompted by an outstanding talk at last year’s CANE meeting at Yale University by Anne Mahoney of Tufts (and former president of this fine organization) entitled “Ancient Greek Puzzle Poems.” The Greeks loved riddles and clever puzzles of logic, math, and myth. Perhaps the most famous puzzle in ancient Greek myth comes from the Oedipus myth. As we learn from the mythographer Apollodorus, whose Bibliotheke, or “Library of Greek Myth” is the most important ancient compilation of myth, the riddle of the Sphinx was “What is four-footed and two-footed and three-footed but has one voice.” The Thebans were at a loss, but when Oedipus arrived he solved it, ridding the city of the Sphinx, and gained the kingship and his mother Jocasta as wife. Apollodorus gives a short form of the riddle; the earliest version of the riddle that we have is the 4th century mythographer Asclepiades (fr. 12), who according to a later author (Athenaeus, Deipn. 10.456b) had the following as a the whole riddle:

There is on land a two-footed, four-footed and three-footed creature who has one voice, but out of all the creatures who creep on land and are in the sky and in the sea, it alone changes its nature. But when it walks supported by the most feet, it is then that the speed in its limbs is feeblest.

This full version, written in hexameters like a Delphic oracular response, is common in ancient texts and is found in the Greek Anthology (14.64). A major question is: is this the version assumed by Sophocles a century before Asclepiades? This is what Oedipus tells Tiresias, who, our hero reminds us, was unable to solve the riddle through his prophetic art:

Come, tell me, where have you proved yourself a seer? Why, when the watchful dog who wove dark song was here, did you say nothing to free the people? Yet the riddle, at least, was not for the first comer to read: there was need of a seer’s help, [395] and you were discovered not to have this art, either from birds, or known from some god. But rather I, Oedipus the ignorant, stopped her, having attained the answer through my wit alone, untaught by birds.

We’ll never know for sure, but I wanted to propose to you another riddle from Dr. Mahoney’s talk, the ninth poem from the 14th book of the Greek Anthology. It’s a remarkably compressed riddle of two lines, and I confess I could not make heads or tails out of it with the few minutes Dr. Mahoney gave us to think it through. Can you figure out this mythological figure?

Ἄνδρ’ ἐμὸν εἷλ’ ἑκυρός, ἑκυρὸν δ’ ἐμὸς ἔκτανεν ἀνὴρ

καὶ δαὴρ ἑκυρὸν καὶ ἑκυρὸς γενέτην.

My husband was killed by my father-in-law. My father-in-law was killed by my husband.

My brother-in-law [specifically, my husband’s brother] killed my father-in-law, 

and my father-in-law killed my father. 

Answer to last week’s puzzle: all three mythological heroes suffered a leg wound. Philoctetes, son of Poeas and heir to Heracles’ bow and arrows, was famously bitten by a snake and left on Lemnos; Telephos, raised by a deer after he was exposed by his mother Auge, ends up in Mysia where he is wounded in the thigh by Achilles and then healed by him; and Bellerophon, who dislocates his hips when he falls from Pegasus onto the Aleian plains in southern Anatolia. 

By Scott Smith, CANE President