Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Haemon.
The gallery
Haemon Discovering the Body of Antigone
Henry Fuseli, 1800
Fuseli's gray-wash drawing (Huntington Library) freezes the Sophoclean catastrophe that defines Haemon: Creon's son finds Antigone hanged in her tomb and will turn the sword on himself. The British-Swiss Romantic stages the fiancé not as a debating prince but as a body stricken by sight — the visual counterpart to Antigone's last episode. Few images name Haemon so squarely; this one makes him the discoverer of the tragedy his father wrote.
On screen
In music & on stage
In play
Antigone
Sophocles
Sophocles' tragedy makes Haemon Creon's son and Antigone's betrothed — the voice of the city who fails to sway his father and dies by his own hand in her tomb.
Antigone
Jean Anouilh
Anouilh's Occupation-era rewrite keeps Haemon as the fiancé who offers escape and is refused — the Theban prince rewritten for a century that heard Creon as tyranny.