Creon (King of Thebes): The king of Thebes who condemned Antigone for burying her brother

First episode of Antigone (Sophocles, c. 442 BC): a guard comes before Creon dragging his feet, so frightened that he takes an age to say why he is there. Someone has sprinkled a layer of dust over the corpse of Polynices, the brother who attacked Thebes and whom the new king has forbidden anyone to bury. When the chorus suggests the gods may have done it, Creon silences them and offers his own explanation: there are citizens who grumble against him and have bribed the guards, for nothing so evil as money ever grew current among men. If the culprit is not found, he threatens, death alone will not be enough for them; they will first be hung up alive. This is how a king rules who has just come to the throne after a civil war in which Oedipus’s two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, killed each other. He has decreed honors for the defender and dogs and birds for the attacker, with death for anyone who buries him. The culprit turns out to be his niece Antigone, who places the laws of the gods above the decree; Creon sentences her to be walled up alive in a cave. Neither his son Haemon, Antigone’s betrothed, nor the prophet Tiresias changes his mind in time: when he gives way, Antigone has hanged herself, Haemon kills himself beside her and his wife Eurydice takes her own life on hearing it.

// The theoryPunishment justified by its consequences

Utilitarianism, formulated by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century, judges an action by its consequences: it is good if it produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Applied to criminal law, it implies that punishment is itself an evil, justified only if it prevents a greater evil, above all by deterring others. Two ideas still alive come from that: punishment must be proportionate, and a punishment that prevents nothing, or causes more harm than it prevents, cannot be justified. Creon reasons like a primitive utilitarian: the good of the city is above everything, and an exemplary punishment protects everyone.

// The subjectA new king who cannot give way

Creon has just come to the throne after a civil war, and Sophocles presents him as a man who needs to demonstrate authority. His first speech is a reasonable defense of order: whoever puts a friend above his country is worthless. The problem is that he cannot tell firmness from obstinacy. When Antigone defies him, the conflict becomes personal: he cannot yield to a woman, nor to his son, nor to a prophet. Every argument against him seems to him an attack on his authority. When he finally listens to Tiresias, his obstinacy has already killed three people.

Sophocles grants him a faultless inaugural speech and then takes it apart scene by scene. Facing Antigone, who denies nothing, his argument stops being the city: while he lives, he says, no woman shall rule him. He condemns Ismene too, who never touched the corpse, because he has seen her distraught inside the palace and takes her for an accomplice; he only relents later, when the chorus asks whether he really means to kill them both. With Haemon, who tells him the whole city mourns for Antigone in secret, the argument ends in a sentence the son throws back at him like a blow: that is no city which belongs to one man. And with Tiresias he repeats the reflex he showed the guard: the prophet tribe, he says, was ever fond of money. Three times the same answer to anyone who disagrees, bribery or insolence. The common-good calculation he claims to make needs information, and Creon has turned everyone who brings it into a suspect.

// The crackThe consequences the calculation did not see

The tragedy is, in a sense, a utilitarian criticism of Creon: his punishment produces the very thing it sought to prevent, disorder and death, including the destruction of his own family. But it also points to a limit of utilitarianism. Antigone does not reason by consequences but by duties: there are things that cannot be done, or left undone, even if it suits the city. That tension between the calculation of the common good and individual rights or duties is what, centuries later, led John Stuart Mill to limit the power of the state over the individual.

The other limit is practical. Utilitarianism requires foreseeing consequences, and rulers tend to foresee them badly, especially when their authority is at stake. Creon thought he was calculating for the city; in reality, he was calculating for himself.