Sisyphus

Sisyphus is the cleverest mortal in Greek myth and one of its best-known sinners. In Homer's Iliad, the Lycian warrior Glaucus traces his own descent from him. There is a city Ephyre, Glaucus says, where Sisyphus lived, the craftiest of men, son of Aeolus. Sisyphus fathered Glaucus, and Glaucus fathered the hero Bellerophon.

Apollodorus's Library fills in the family. His father Aeolus, son of Hellen, ruled the lands around Thessaly and had seven sons, Sisyphus among them. Sisyphus founded Ephyra, which Apollodorus says is now called Corinth. He married Merope, a daughter of Atlas.

The punishment is older than any explanation of it. In Book 11 of Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus sees Sisyphus among the dead in the underworld, in violent torment. He braces with hands and feet and thrusts a monstrous stone toward the crest of a hill. Just before it goes over, its weight turns it back, and the ruthless stone rolls down to the plain. He strains again, sweating, with dust rising from his head. Homer names no crime. The whole arc, from the informing to the stone, is told in Sisyphus and the Boulder.

Apollodorus supplies one. Zeus had secretly carried off Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. When Asopus came looking for her, Sisyphus betrayed the secret. In a later book Apollodorus adds that Asopus came to Corinth and learned from Sisyphus who the abductor was. Asopus pursued Zeus until Zeus drove him back to his own streams with thunderbolts.

Pausanias tells the same story with a price attached. On the summit of Acrocorinth, he says, a spring rises behind the temple of Aphrodite. Sisyphus would not tell Asopus what he knew until Asopus gave him that spring. Once he had it, he informed. For this, Pausanias says, Sisyphus is punished in Hades, and then he adds: if anyone believes the story.

A second tradition makes Sisyphus the man who got out of death. The elegies of Theognis say he persuaded Persephone with wheedling words and returned from Hades to the light of the sun, something no one else had contrived. A darker version has him bind Death in chains until Ares sets Death free. It is not in the Homer, Apollodorus or Pausanias passages on Sisyphus. J. G. Frazer's notes to Apollodorus trace it to an ancient commentary on Iliad 6.153.

At home Sisyphus founded more than a city. Pausanias says a dolphin brought the drowned boy Melicertes ashore at the Isthmus. Sisyphus found him, buried him there, and established the Isthmian Games in his honor, one of the Panhellenic Games. Apollodorus agrees that Sisyphus instituted the games for Melicertes. Pausanias also reports a tradition that Medea, leaving Corinth, handed the kingdom over to Sisyphus.

Corinth remembered him with pride. Pindar's thirteenth Olympian Ode was written for a Corinthian victor. Promising not to falsify the story of Corinth, Pindar names Sisyphus first, very shrewd in his devising, like a god.

Later poets turned his name into an insult aimed at Odysseus. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus is the son of Laertes, and his mother Anticleia is the daughter of Autolycus. The tragedians hint at another father. The chorus of Sophocles's Ajax speaks of the man born of the abject line of Sisyphus. In Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon fears the army will learn that he promised Artemis his daughter Iphigenia. The son of Sisyphus knows all, he warns, and Menelaus answers with Odysseus's name.

Sophocles's Philoctetes is the bluntest. Philoctetes calls Odysseus the offspring of Sisyphus that was bought by Laertes. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Ajax makes the same charge in the contest for the arms of Achilles. Odysseus, he says, is sprung from the blood of Sisyphus and just like him in theft and fraud. None of these speakers is a friend of Odysseus.

Ovid keeps Sisyphus at his stone. When Juno goes down to the underworld in the Metamorphoses, she sees him chasing or pushing the stone that always comes back, near Tantalus. She asks why this one of the brothers suffers eternal punishment while his brother Athamas lives in a rich palace. When Orpheus sings to the dead, Sisyphus sits idle on his rock, the moment told in Orpheus in the Underworld.

Pausanias saw him in paint as well. In Polygnotus's picture of the underworld at Delphi, Sisyphus, son of Aeolus, is trying his hardest to push the rock up a cliff. His grave was harder to find. Citing the poet Eumelus, Pausanias says Sisyphus was buried on the Isthmus, but few Corinthians, even in his own day, knew where.

The best-known modern reading is Albert Camus's essay The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942. Camus calls Sisyphus the absurd hero, punished for his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life. The essay ends: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

That is a twentieth-century philosophical reading, not an ancient one. Camus also credits Homer with the story of Death in chains, which the Odyssey's scene of the stone does not contain. The ancient sources treat the stone as a punishment and say nothing about happiness.