Sisyphus
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In Greek mythology, Sisyphus (Greek Σίσυφος; transliteration: Sísuphos; IPA: ['sɪsɪfəs]) was a king punished in the underworld by being set to roll a huge boulder up a hill throughout eternity.
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[edit] In myth
Sisyphus was the son of Aeolus and Enarete, husband of Merope, and King/Founder of Ephyra (Corinth). Later sources say Sisyphus was the father of Odysseus by Anticlea, just before she married her later husband, Laertes. Sisyphus was said to have founded the Isthmian games in honour of Melicertes, whose body he found lying on the shore of the Isthmus of Corinth.
Sisyphus promoted navigation and commerce, but was avaricious and deceitful in his killing of travellers and guests in violation of the laws of hospitality. From Homer onwards, Sisyphus was famed as the craftiest of men. He seduced his niece, took his brother's throne and betrayed Zeus's secrets (specifically, Zeus' rape of Aegina, the river god Asopus' daughter; by some accounts, the daughter of his father Aeolus, making her either Sisyphus' sister or half-sister). Zeus then ordered Hades to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus. Sisyphus slyly asked Thanatos to try the chains to show how they worked. When Thanatos did so, Sisyphus secured them and threatened Hades. This caused an uproar, and no human could die until Ares (who was annoyed that his battles had lost their fun because his opponents would not die) intervened, freeing Thanatos and sending Sisyphus to Tartarus.
However, before Sisyphus died, he had told his wife that when he was dead she was not to offer the usual sacrifice. In the underworld he complained that his wife was neglecting him and persuaded Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, to allow him to go back to the upper world and ask her to perform her duty. When Sisyphus got back to Corinth, he refused to return and was eventually carried back to the underworld by Hermes. In another version of the myth, Persephone was directly persuaded that he had been conducted to Tartarus by mistake and ordered him to be freed (Bernard Evslin's Gods, Demigods & Demons, 209-210).
[edit] "Sisyphean task" or "Sisyphean challenge"
As a punishment from the gods for his trickery, Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he reached the top of the hill, the rock always escaped him and he had to begin again (Odyssey, xi. 593). The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for Sisyphus due to the mortal's hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus. Sisyphus took the bold step of reporting one of Zeus's sexual conquests, telling the river god Asopus of the whereabouts of Asopus' daughter, Aegina. Zeus had taken her away, and regardless of the impropriety of Zeus's frequent conquests, Sisyphus unmistakably overstepped his bounds by considering himself a peer of the gods who could rightfully report their indiscretions (Edith Hamilton's Mythology, 312-313). As a result, Zeus displayed his own cleverness by binding Sisyphus to an eternity of frustration. Accordingly, pointless or interminable activities are often 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 x. 31).
[edit] Interpretations
According to the solar theory, Sisyphus is the disk of the sun that rises every day in the east and then sinks into the west.[1] Other scholars regard him as a personification of waves rising and falling, or of the treacherous sea.[2] The 1st-century BCE Epicurean 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) Welcker suggested that he symbolises the vain struggle of man in the pursuit of knowledge, and S. Reinach (Revue archéologique, 1904) that his punishment is based on a picture in which Sisyphus was represented rolling a huge stone up Acrocorinthus, symbolic of the labour and skill involved in the building of the Sisypheum. Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, sees Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but concludes "one must imagine Sisyphus happy."
[edit] See also
- Sisyphus (dialogue), a dialogue ascribed to Plato
- Sisyphus cooling (quantum mechanical effect)
- 1866 Sisyphus, asteroid
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
