Of Creon The Tragic Hero In Sophocles Antigone

The tragic hero in this play written by Sophocles, “Antigone”, has to be Antigone, the main character, or Creon, the King of Thebes and Antigone’s uncle. “Antigone” is about Antigone’s disobedience towards Creon and her death sentence that would cause the suicidal deaths of her own, and Creon’s wife, Eurydice, and his son, Haemon. A tragic hero is a character who makes a judgement error that inevitably leads to his/her own destruction, and in this play that tragic hero is Creon. A tragic hero usually has characteristics such as hamartia, a tragic flaw that causes the downfall of the hero, and hubris, excessive pride and disrespect of hero for natural order (Beers 263) Creon’s tragic flaw is his excessive pride. When Creon is speaking to Tiresias, a blind seer, he states, “Thou art a wise seer, but in love with wrong” (Sophocles 57). He does not believe that Tiresias is

Haemon is Antigone’s fiance and when he found out that his soon-to-be wife is going to be killed, he confronts his father about it. Sophocles foreshadows Haemon’s death when he says, “Bring out the wretch, that in his sight, at once, here, with her bridegroom by her, she may die!”(Sophocles 42). Haemon ends up killing himself because he did not want to live without Antigone, for he loved her too much. Once Eurydice found out what had happened to her son, she could not take it. “...a voice of woe to my own household pierces through my ears; and I sink backward on my handmaidens afaint for terror…” (Sophocles 64). All of this was too much for her to handle so she decided it would just be easier if she just took her life. Creon finds out the death of his wife through a messenger and blames himself, for his actions led all of his sorrows to happen. “I, I was the slayer, I say it, unhappy, of thee!” (Sophocles