Creon

Son of Menoeceus of Thebes, brother of Jocasta, and the permanent regent of Thebes — the figure who takes the throne every time the Cadmeid royal line has a crisis and steps back whenever the line produces an heir. He took the regency after Laius's death and offered the throne and the widowed queen to whoever should free Thebes from the Sphinx (Apollodorus *Bibliotheca* 3.5.8); he took the regency again after Oedipus's self-blinding and exile; he took it a third time after the mutual fratricide of Polynices and Eteocles at the seventh gate, and his proclamation that no burial was to be given to the attackers drives the plot of Sophocles's *Antigone* — Antigone, his niece, defies the edict, is walled up alive, and her suicide is followed by those of his son Haemon and his wife Eurydice (Sophocles *Antigone*).

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