Comparing Creon In Antigone And Oedipus Rex

Sophocles’s plays Antigone and Oedipus Rex are two very dramatic stories that are accounts of convoluted problems occurring in Thebes, Ancient Greece, around 430 B.C. In Antigone, King Creon refuses to allow his brother to be buried as proper funeral rites after the civil war of Thebes. His sister Antigone defies this, thus Creon sentences her to be buried alive- until she takes her own life instead. Furthermore, Oedipus Rex is about a man named Oedipus who has been cursed to kill his father and marry his mother. He is left to die as a child, but when he is found and raised he flees in order to prevent the curse from happening to whom he believes to be his real parents. Ironically, he still ends up killing his father and marrying his mother. When reading Sophocles’ plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone, the character Creon’s personality differs within the two plays in the way that he seems to be a benevolent citizen in Oedipus Rex, and a merciless ruler in Antigone. His excessive pride in the beginning of Oedipus Rex also contrasts in to the end of Antigone because it diminishes to nothing. However, Creon remains the same in both plays because he is always selfish and pities himself. Creon, once a benevolent man in Oedipus Rex, becomes a ruthless …show more content…
When Creon says to Oedipus, “Well then you have my sister to your wife… and make I not a third equal with you?” (Oedipus 21), he is only looking to have a part of the land from Oedipus because his sister is in power. Furthermore, in the final speech of Creon, he says, “The truth is hard to bear; surely a god has crushed me.. To trample out the thing I held most dear…the pains that men will take to come to pain” (Antigone 5.229-233), and "is there no pity for me?” (5.238). Creon’s only concern is the way he feels and what he gets in return instead of the way he effects the people around