Haemon's Struggle In Hesiod And Sophocles '

Hesiod and Sophocles discuss how the youth threaten elders and their positions of power. The role of the son in their works shines light onto how rulers in their quest to retain power can be threatened even by those who support them. This fear causes the father to push their son away thus fulfilling their fears as the sons’ future actions lead to a destabilization in the political order. This destabilization is show to be a loss of political power as the son either supplants their role or renders the king politically useless. In short, for the father a son is a symbol of the transience of his power. The fear of his child’s potential opposition to his reign causes the father to not collaborate with his son which leads to instability that usurps the pre-existing hierarchy. Antigone and Theogony offer …show more content…
Haemon 's death was the ultimate cause of Creon loss of control. He realized his mistakes and condemned himself when he stated “You were expelled from life/ by my bad judgement, never yours”. His fear of making a biased decision caused him to make a bad choice. This bad decision led to the deaths of most of the royal family thus leaving Creon’s potency as a king null. With death and sadness on his brain, Creon is forced to face the fact that he was the author of his own turmoil. Creon is remorseful after his loss of power, this is not the case in Theogony. Ouranos’ emotions were one’s of outrage and anger. To him Kronos had “committed a/ terrible,/ act, and… “vengeance’ was destined to follow”. Ouranos lost his potency when he was castrated yet that didn’t stop him from exacting vengeance on his son in the form of the prophecy told to Kronos that his son would supplant him. In a way he ensured that Kronos would follow the same path as him. To this point he was correct, for despite Kronos’s attempts to subvert the prophecy he instead fed right into it and he lost his