Creon (king of Thebes)

After the death of King Laius of Thebes at the hands of his own son Oedipus, Creon sat on the vacant throne and became the ruler of the kingdom.

During this regency, Amphitryon arrived with his fiancée Alcmena and her half-brother Licymnius from Mycenae, seeking exile and purification for the death of his prospective father-in-law King Electryon, whom he accidentally had killed.

Amphitryon then, not being able to cope with the uncatchable fox, obtained from Cephalus the dog that his wife Procris had received from Minos, which was fated to catch whatever it pursued.

And although the dilemma that arose when the two animals confronted each other was of such nature that it required the intervention of Zeus, the problem was nevertheless solved when the god turned both beasts into stone; and so Creon aided Amphitryon and, when the war was over, Alcmena married her fiancé.

[6] The most serious trial that Thebes had to confront under the first rule of Creon was, however, the calamity of the Sphinx, which appeared laying waste the Theban fields, and declaring that it would not depart unless someone correctly interpreted a certain riddle which she presented.

In order to face this adversity, Creon made a proclamation throughout Hellas, promising that he would give the kingdom of Thebes and his sister Jocasta in marriage to him who solved the riddle of the Sphinx.

And since when it comes to acquiring power, property and women, there are always many willing to take whatever risks they deem necessary, going through no matter which atrocities, many came and many were destroyed by the Sphinx, who gobbled them up one by one — the price of failure to solve her riddle.

But since all calamities must end some day, the Sphinx was finally defeated by Oedipus, who, having heard Creon's proclamation, came to Thebes and, by solving the riddle, caused the beast to destroy itself.

And still others might maintain that Oedipus was, in any case, guilty of murder: for he killed not one man, but two, and for a trivial matter; and Creon could be deemed to have been out of his mind when he offered both throne and queen to a complete unknown on the ground of one single merit.

Creon gives Eteocles a full and honorable burial, but orders (under penalty of death) that Polynices' corpse be left to rot on the battlefield as punishment for his treason.

Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, who is betrothed to Creon's son Haemon, defies him by burying her brother, and is condemned to be entombed alive as punishment.

Creon is portrayed as a tyrant in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, and in a later adaptation of the same story, William Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's play The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The Roman poet Statius recounts a differing version of Creon's assumption of power from that followed by Sophocles, in his first-century epic, the Thebaid.

This alternate narrative may have been based on a previous epic of the Theban cycle written by the Greek poet Antimachus in the 4th or 5th century BC.

Antimachus' work has been lost, but in any case, the classic myths often had more than one variation, and playwrights and poets had some freedom to choose or even innovate for dramatic effect.