Creon's Tragic Flaw

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Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone is a sad tale that is essentially about a girl who buries her brother who was deemed a traitor by King Creon, the leader of Thebes. The story dives into the dilemma of valuing yourself over moral obligations toward another human being. King Creon’s hubris impeded his decision whether to allow the burial of Antigone’s brother Polyneices and this led to King Creon losing all that mattered to him: his family and leadership. Thus, King Creon’s excessive pride is his tragic flaw, a deadly trait for any leader.
While taking the throne, King Creon commanded, “Polyneices, who returned from exile, eager to wipe out in all-consuming fire his ancestral city and its native gods, keen to seize upon his family’s blood and lead men into slavery—for him, the proclamation in the state declares he will have no burial mound, no funeral rites, and no lament.”(Sophocles 199-206). In this decisive proclamation, he went against the ways Greeks dealt with the departed; King Creon denied the burial of Polyneices, a sacred ritual for the Greeks. More specifically though, he denied...

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