Sisyphus and the Boulder

Sisyphus is punished in Hades because he crossed Zeus. The ancient sources tell the road there in pieces: he informs on a god, he outwits Death, he talks his way back from the dead, and at the end he pushes a stone. This page lays the pieces in that order and says which writer supplies each one. For the king himself, his family and his city, see the Sisyphus page.

The first crime is the one the mythographers name. In Apollodorus's Library, Zeus secretly carries off Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. Asopus goes looking for her, and Sisyphus betrays the secret to him. Apollodorus says outright that this is the reason for the punishment in Hades.

Pausanias adds a price. On the summit of Acrocorinth, he says, a spring rises behind the temple of Aphrodite. Sisyphus knew that Zeus had ravished Aegina, but he would not tell Asopus until the river god gave him a spring on the Acrocorinthus. Once Asopus agreed, Sisyphus turned informer. Pausanias closes with a hedge: he is punished in Hades, "if anyone believes the story."

What happens next is not in Homer, Apollodorus or Pausanias. It comes from a scholion, an ancient marginal note, on Iliad 6.153. The scholiast cites the mythographer Pherecydes, a writer of the fifth century BCE, but the note itself was gathered much later, so treat it as secondary evidence for an old tale.

According to the note, Zeus carried Aegina away from Phlius to Oenone by way of Corinth. When Asopus came searching, Sisyphus told him about the abduction, and Zeus's anger fell on Sisyphus. Zeus sent Thanatos, Death, to fetch him. Sisyphus saw Death coming and bound him in strong chains. So no human being died, until Hades freed Death and delivered Sisyphus into his hands.

The sources disagree on who ends the stoppage. J. G. Frazer's note to Apollodorus says the story has Ares release Death. The scholion as published on Topos Text has Hades do it. Both agree that Death is set free and Sisyphus is taken.

The scholion has Sisyphus escape once more before the end. Before he dies, he tells his wife Merope not to send the customary gifts to Hades for him. Hades notices the omission and lets Sisyphus go back to reprimand her. Sisyphus refuses to return. He lives to old age, and then Hades forces him to roll a rock into the underworld so he cannot flee again.

The elegies of Theognis tell a different escape. In a poem about wealth, Theognis says that a man might be wiser than Aeolus's son Sisyphus, whose wheedling words persuaded Persephone, and still be worth nothing without riches. Sisyphus returned even from Hades by his wiliness, a thing contrived by no one else. He is the one man who has seen the black portal and come back to the light of the sun. The Theognis lines read here do not mention Death in chains, and the scholion does not mention Persephone. These are two stories about the same trickster, not one story told twice.

Homer knows none of this. In Book 11 of the Odyssey, Odysseus has sailed to the edge of the world to question the dead, and he watches the great sinners suffer in the underworld. After Tantalus and his vanishing water, he sees Sisyphus. Homer names no crime and no judge. He shows only the labor, in the words of A. T. Murray's translation.

Apollodorus gives the same picture in a line. Sisyphus is punished in Hades by rolling a stone with his hands and head in the effort to heave it over the top, but push it as he will, it rebounds backward. Apollodorus is the writer who ties the stone to Aegina. That link turns a scene from a poem into an ending to a plot: the king who could not keep a secret, and who beat Death, is given a task he can never finish.

The Tartarus page lists Sisyphus among the prisoners of that deepest pit. The Homeric passage does not use the name. It says only that Odysseus saw him among the dead.