In Greek mythology, Sisyphus or Sisyphos (; ) is the founder and king of Ancient Corinth (now known as Corinth). He reveals Zeus's abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus, thereby incurring Zeus's wrath. His subsequent cheating of death earns him eternal punishment in the Greek underworld, once he dies of old age. The gods forced him to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. Through the classicism on contemporary culture, tasks that are both and are therefore described as Sisyphean ().
Etymology
R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a
pre-Greek origin and a connection with the root of the word (σοφός, "wise").
[R. S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009, p. xxxiii.] German
mythographer Otto Gruppe thought that the name derived from (σίσυς, "a goat's skin"), in reference to a rain-charm in which goats' skins were used.
[Gruppe, O. Griechische Mythologie (1906), ii., p. 1021]
Family
Sisyphus was formerly a
Ancient Thessaly prince as the son of King Aeolus of Aeolia and
Enarete, daughter of Deimachus.
[Apollodorus, 1.7.3] He was the brother of
Athamas,
Salmoneus,
Cretheus, Perieres,
Deioneus, Magnes, Calyce,
Canace, Alcyone,
Pisidice and Perimede.
Sisyphus married the Pleiad Merope by whom he became the father of Ornytion (Porphyrion[Scholia on Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 3.1094]), Glaucus, Thersander and Almus.[Pausanias, 2.4.3] He was the grandfather of Bellerophon through Glaucus;[Apollodorus, 1.9.3][Homer, Iliad 6.152 ff.] and of Minyas, founder of Orchomenus, through Almus.[Scholia on Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 3.1553] Another account related that Minyas was Sisyphus's son instead.[Scholia on Homer, Iliad 2.511]
In other versions of the myth, Sisyphus was the true father of Odysseus by Anticleia instead of Laërtes.[Hyginus, Fabulae 201; Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae 43; Suda, s.v. Sisyphus]
Mythology
Reign
Sisyphus was the founder and first king of Ephyra (supposedly the original name of
Ancient Corinth).
While king, according to Pausanias, he founded the
Isthmian games in honor of
Melicertes, whose dead body was brought to shore on the Isthmus of Corinth by a
dolphin.
[Hard, p. 431; Pausanias, 2.1.3.] In a fragment of
Pindar, he instead founds the games (in honour of Melicertes) upon the instructions of a group of nymphs.
[Gantz, p. 176; Pindar, fr. 6.5 (1) Snell-Maehler (Maehler, p. 3).]
Conflict with Salmoneus
Sisyphus and his brother
Salmoneus were known to hate each other, and Sisyphus consulted the
Pythia on just how to kill Salmoneus without incurring any severe consequences for himself. From
Homer onward, Sisyphus was famed as the craftiest of men. He seduced Salmoneus's daughter
Tyro in one of his plots to kill Salmoneus, only for Tyro to slay their children when she discovered that Sisyphus was planning on using them to eventually dethrone her father.
Cheating death
Sisyphus betrayed one of Zeus's secrets by revealing the whereabouts of the
Asopides Aegina to her father, the river god
Asopus, in return for causing a spring to flow on the Corinthian
acropolis.
Zeus ordered Thanatos to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus. But Sisyphus sensed him coming, and seized the opportunity to trap Thanatos himself in chains instead. Once Thanatos was bound by the strong chains, no one died on Earth, causing an uproar. Ares, the god of war, perhaps annoyed that his battles had become less diverting because his opponents would not die, intervened and freed Thanatos, enabling deaths to happen again, and turned Sisyphus over to him.
In some versions, Hades was sent to chain Sisyphus and was chained himself. As long as Hades was trapped, nobody could die. Consequently, sacrifices could not be made to the gods, and those that were old and sick were suffering. The gods finally threatened to make life so miserable for Sisyphus that he would wish he were dead. He then had no choice but to release Hades.
Before Sisyphus died, he had told his wife to throw his naked corpse into the middle of the public square (purportedly as a test of his wife's love for him). This caused Sisyphus to end up on the shores of the river Styx when he was brought to the Greek underworld. Complaining to either Hades or Persephone that this was a sign of his wife's disrespect for him, Sisyphus persuaded her to allow him to return to the upper world, in order to scold his wife for not burying his body and giving it a proper funeral as a loving wife should do.[Pherecydes frag. FGrH 3 F 119] But when back in the world of the living, Sisyphus refused to return to the Underworld. He returned many years later either from dying of advanced age, or being forcibly dragged back there by Hermes.
In another version of the myth, Persephone was tricked by Sisyphus that he had been conducted to Tartarus by mistake, and so she ordered that he be released.
In Philoctetes by Sophocles, there is a reference to the father of Odysseus (rumoured to have been Sisyphus, and not Laërtes, whom we know as the father in the Odyssey) upon having returned from the dead. Euripides, in Cyclops, also identified Sisyphus as Odysseus's father.
Punishment in the underworld
As a punishment for his crimes, Hades made Sisyphus roll a huge boulder endlessly up a steep hill in
Tartarus.
[Homer, Odyssey 11.593] The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for Sisyphus due to his
belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself. Hades accordingly displayed his own cleverness by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from Sisyphus before he reached the top which ended up consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration. Thus, pointless or interminable activities are sometimes described as "Sisyphean". Sisyphus was a common subject for ancient writers and was depicted by the painter
Polygnotus on the walls of the
Lesche at
Delphi.
[Pausanias, 10.31]
Interpretations
According to the
solar theory, King Sisyphus is the disk of the sun that rises every day in the east and then sinks into the west.
Other scholars regard him as a personification of waves rising and falling, or of the treacherous sea.
The 1st-century BC
Epicureanism philosopher
Lucretius interprets the myth of Sisyphus as personifying politicians aspiring for political office who are constantly defeated, with the quest for power, in itself an "empty thing", being likened to rolling the boulder up the hill.
[ De Rerum Natura III] Friedrich Welcker suggested that he symbolises the vain struggle of man in the pursuit of knowledge, and
Salomon Reinach[ Revue archéologique, 1904] that his punishment is based on a picture in which Sisyphus was represented rolling a huge stone
Acrocorinthus, symbolic of the labour and skill involved in the building of the Sisypheum.
Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay
The Myth of Sisyphus, saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but Camus concludes "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" as "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." In his 1994
The Body of Myth, J. Nigro Sansonese,
[Sansonese, J. Nigro. The Body of Myth. Rochester, 1994, pp. 45–52. ] building on the work of Georges Dumézil, speculates that the origin of the name "Sisyphus" is onomatopoetic of the continual back-and-forth, susurrant sound ("siss phuss") made by the breath in the nasal passages, situating the mythology of Sisyphus in a far larger context of archaic (see Proto-Indo-European religion) trance-inducing techniques related to breath control. The repetitive inhalation–exhalation cycle is described esoterically in the myth as an up–down motion of Sisyphus and his boulder on a hill.
In experiments that test how workers respond when the meaning of their task is diminished, the test condition is referred to as the Sisyphusian condition. The two main conclusions of the experiment are that people work harder when their work seems more meaningful, and that people underestimate the relationship between meaning and motivation.
Literary interpretations
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Homer describes Sisyphus in both Book VI of the Iliad and Book XI of the Odyssey.
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Ovid, the Roman poet, makes reference to Sisyphus in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Orpheus descends and confronts Hades and Persephone, he sings a song so that they will grant his wish to bring Eurydice back from the dead. After this song is sung, Ovid shows how moving it was by noting that Sisyphus, emotionally affected for just a moment, stops his eternal task and sits on his rock, the Latin wording being inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo ("and you sat, Sisyphus, on your rock").
[Ovid. Metamorphoses, 10.44.]
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In Plato's Apology, Socrates looks forward to the after-life where he can meet figures such as Sisyphus, who think themselves wise, so that he can question them and find who is wise and who "thinks he is when he is not."
[Apology, 41c]
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Albert Camus, the French Algeria absurdism, wrote an essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he elevates Sisyphus to the status of absurd hero.
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Franz Kafka repeatedly referred to Sisyphus as a bachelor; Kafkaesque for him were those qualities that brought out the Sisyphus-like qualities in himself. According to Frederick Karl: "The man who struggled to reach the heights only to be thrown down to the depths embodied all of Kafka's aspirations; and he remained himself, alone, solitary."
[Karl, Frederick. Franz Kafka: Representative Man. New York: International Publishing Corporation, 1991. p. 2]
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The philosopher Richard Clyde Taylor uses the myth of Sisyphus as a representation of a life made meaningless because it consists of bare repetition.
[Taylor, Richard. "Time and Life's Meaning." Review of Metaphysics 40 (June 1987): 675–686.]
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Wolfgang Mieder has collected cartoons that build on the image of Sisyphus, many of them editorial cartoons.
[Wolfgang Mieder. 2013. Neues von Sisyphus: Sprichtwortliche Mythen der Antike in moderner Literatur, Medien und Karikaturen. Vienna: Praesens.]
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Hollis Robbins, reading Ovid against Camus, proposes that the punishment was not a punishment but a recognition and making legible of Sisyphus's essential nature: his compulsion to push against the rules.
See also
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, a 2021 South Korean TV series, which uses the myth as a symbol for its theme.
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Sisyphus cooling, a cooling technique named after the Sisyphus myth
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Syzyfowe prace, a novel by Stefan Żeromski
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Comparable characters:
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Naranath Bhranthan, a willing boulder pusher in Indian folklore
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Jan Tregeagle, a Cornish magistrate who must empty Dozmary Pool with a limpet shell or weave sand into rope at Gwenor Cove
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Tantalus, who was similarly punished with a neverending toil
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Wu Gang – also tasked with the impossible: to fell a self-regenerating tree on the Moon
Notes
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Apollodorus, The Library with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Greek text available from the same website.
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Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, Two volumes: (Vol. 1), (Vol. 2).
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Hard, Robin, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J. Rose's "Handbook of Greek Mythology", Psychology Press, 2004. . Google Books.
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Homer, Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, PhD in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Homer. Homeri Opera in five volumes. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1920. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Homer, Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library. Greek text available from the same website.
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Herwig Maehler, Pindarus Carmina cum fragmentis. Pars II: Fragmenta. Indices, Bibliotheca Teubneriana, Munich and Leipzig, K. G. Saur Verlag, 1989. .
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Ovid, Metamorphoses translated by Brookes More (1859–1942). Boston, Cornhill Publishing Co. 1922. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Ovid, Metamorphoses. Hugo Magnus. Gotha (Germany). Friedr. Andr. Perthes. 1892. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
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Pausanias, Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library
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Pausanias, Graeciae Descriptio. 3 vols. Leipzig, Teubner. 1903. Greek text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
External links
