Identified in the Theogony as 'Phix,' it was a hybrid monster whose parentage varies widely from source to source. She was a lion-bodied, winged monster with the face of a human, who terrorized the city of Thebes in the generations before Oedipus. She would give a riddle — 'What creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?' — and eat anyone who was unable to answer correctly. It is possible that the Sphinx was sent to Thebes from Ethiopia by either the goddess Hera or the war god Ares. Eventually, Oedipus correctly answered the riddle— 'Man' — and the Sphinx threw herself off her mountainside perch to her death.