Did Oedipus actually solve the riddle of the Sphinx?

The article explores and disputes a classical argument that Oedipus fails to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, as the right answer should not point to an abstract man, but to Oedipus himself, as it is he, who undergoes transformation from a baby crawling on four limbs to a young man walking on two legs and finally to an old man hobbling on a cane (his third leg) after he blinds himself. The author argues that in contrast to the enigmatic creature in the riddle, who consecutively moves from being two-legged to four-legged and finally to three-legged (the sequence conveyed by Asclepiades in a canonical formula of the riddle), Oedipus moves in a reverse order: from being a three-legged creature from the start (as a hobbled baby, crippled young male with a walking cane and a blind man with a staff), to a four-legged man later (in «Oedipus at Colonus» he is leaning upon his daughters symbolically playing the role of Oedipus' two crutches) and finally to a two-legged old person - when he is walking without help from other people and without a cane before he dies. The author argues that in the context of the invariant structure, which incorporates «Oedipus Tyrannus» and «Oedipus at Colonus» by Sophocles as inseparable constituents of one and the same plot, the hidden prophecy contained in the riddle of the Sphinx about a creature with a changing number of feet comes to fruition in Oedipus’s life in an inverted form. The author reveals a meta-literary parallel between the numerical inversion and the spatio-temporal one: Oedipus's life is not a straight line from the past to the future, but from the predicted (predetermined) future (patricide and incest) to the past, manifested topographically by the mount Cithaeron where he started his life and where he returns at the end. The author argues that Oedipus' answer to the riddle of the Sphinx also contains a hidden allusion to the Indo-European prototype of the riddle about pregnant animal.