Apply Aristotle's tragic-hero framework to evaluate whether Creon, rather than Antigone, better fits the definition, using the prophet Tiresias's warning as key evidence.
A useful, slightly uncomfortable question for this week: despite the title, is Antigone actually the play's Aristotelian tragic hero, or is Creon? Antigone is certain and resolute from her first line to her last -- she does not experience a reversal of fortune she failed to see coming, because she expects death and accepts it deliberately. Creon, by contrast, starts the play secure in power and confident in his decree, and ends it having lost his son and his wife as a direct result of a decision he made and then refused to reverse until far too late. That arc -- confidence, refusal to bend, catastrophic reversal, late recognition -- is exactly the shape Aristotle described.
The clearest evidence for Creon's hamartia arrives with Tiresias, the blind prophet whose visions have never been wrong in this story's world. Tiresias warns Creon directly that the gods are angered by Polyneices's exposed, unburied body and that Creon's stubbornness will cost him a member of his own family. Creon's first response is not doubt but insult, accusing the old prophet of taking bribes. Only after the chorus itself, usually cautious and deferential, urges him to listen does Creon begin to waver -- and by the time he acts, the delay itself has already sealed the deaths that follow.
Mastery looks like: They can apply Aristotle's specific terms (hamartia, peripeteia, anagnorisis) to build and defend an evidence-based argument for who the play's true tragic hero is.
Common stumbles: Assuming the title character must automatically be the tragic hero by definition; describing Creon's flaw only as generic "pride" instead of the specific refusal to reconsider a public decision once warned.