How much power should a single person have? How much should someone be able to alter the course of fate, the chosen path of the gods? Can they at all? In his Greek tragedy Antigone, Sophocles examines the indefinite boundaries of human power, not only forcing power and obedience to coexist but questioning what it means to be human. His story follows the conflict between King Creon and his niece, Antigone, as they argue the extent to which the written law can rule and whether this idea of fate is truly the highest power. Antigone, pledging her loyalty to her family and the gods, and the tragic hero Creon, craving control over Thebes, have opposing ideologies on power, which accentuates that there is a delicate balance between fate and free-will. 

Antigone’s family-motivated ideas and acceptance of her fate contradict Creon’s politically-motivated approaches, showing the reader Creon’s reversal of fortune as a tragic hero. Being a new king, Creon exemplifies how naive he is by resisting not only Antigone but fate itself. Antigone is able to challenge Creon’s legal authority by placing the sacred opinion of the gods above his status and showing him that “Justice living with the gods below sent no such laws for men” (Sophocles 509-510). Both characters inadvertently pledge their loyalty to different higher powers, with Creon promising to serve Thebes and Antigone vowing to obey the gods and her family. In fact, their loyalty is the very root of their differences because Creon sees Antigone’s defiance as an offense to Thebes and Antigone views his dictatorship as disobedience to the gods. In this sense, Antigone has accepted her fate of death and chooses to side with the gods if it means her hunger for closure will finally end, but Creon blatantly rejects the gods’ will and exhibits a significant disregard for family and morals. Being a new king, he is driven by the idea of control and a sense of power over the kingdom that he has just been handed. His naive ideology to rule against the gods, structures his journey as a tragic hero and fuels the irony behind his interaction with Antigone. He has a self-righteous cockiness to his demeanor as he fails to understand that “the most obdurate wills are those most prone to break” (Sophocles 538-539). Hubris or excessive pride is Creon’s fatal flaw that ironically catalyzes his journey of trying to break free from his predetermined destiny with the power of his free-will. His conceited nature creates a facade that blinds him from how he is actually avoiding his problems rather than dealing with them effectively. Antigone’s motivation can be summarized as having the gods and fate behind her, fueling her push for Polynices’ burial. In this way, Creon’s resistance to Antigone is a defiance of the gods and further prevents him from listening to the grim reality of fate. He expects loyalty and obedience and impulsively dismisses Antigone’s ideas because she is not motivated by the politics of Thebes. His overconfidence in the power of his free-will starts to define his character as a tragic hero, who is quickly plummeting to his doom because he is unable to grasp the power of fate. 

Creon’s excessive pride or hubris dominates his interactions with Antigone, causing him to test the delicate balance between fate and free will. He disregards the seemingly irrational laws of the gods and favors the more rational, logical laws of men. Antigone tries desperately to show Creon how feeble his written laws are and that his “[arrogant] boasts…[will] bring on great blows of punishment” (Sophocles 1494). Early in the play, Creon seems to have more free-will and liberty in the sense that it is not too late for him to side with the gods. He straddles the fine line between exercising the amount of power he is given and trying to override the gods themselves. His ideological clash with Antigone reveals that, in his eyes, fate only offers him opportunities but his free-will will take him beyond those opportunities. Creon believes that his free-will is the single most powerful force on the planet and that it will determine not only his future but also Antigone’s. Eventually, Creon becomes enlightened that his obsession with free-will has given him no value in the eyes of the people or the gods and that “what [he is] in life is nothing” (Sophocles 1469). Creon and Antigone’s interaction eventually comes to an anagnorisis, where Creon finally sees that his free-will causes only suffering. He rebelliously exercises his freedom of choice, only to realize that it has been fate all along. Sophocles uses Creon and Antigone to showcase that humans have no choice and no matter how much they think they are resisting fate, its unalterable, unchangeable nature will eventually find a way. Creon was meant to suffer as a result of his interaction with Antigone, which fuels the tragic irony behind the story that free-will is just an illusion created by humans’ inability to grasp the concept of fate. 

Antigone’s pledge of loyalty to her family and the gods contradicts Creon’s power-hungry ideology about the balance between fate and free-will, rendering him a tragic hero. Antigone represents the gods and feels that she belongs to a higher being, while Creon becomes infatuated with his new-found power. It soon becomes clear to Creon that he wasn’t exercising his free-will to resist fate, fate was determining his life in a way that he had no power over it all along. And, in that sense, Sophocles uses Creon and Antigone’s relationship to accentuate that in order to truly control fate, one just needs to accept it.