Sisyphus

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For the genus of dung beetle, see Sisyphus (beetle).

Image:Nekyia Staatliche Antikensammlungen 1494 n2.jpg

Persephone supervising Sisyphus in the Underworld, Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 530 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 1494)

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus (Σίσυφος) (Template:IPAEng) was a king punished in the Tartarus by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, and repeat this throughout eternity.

Today, Sisyphean can be used as an adjective meaning that an activity is unending and/or repetitive. It could also be used to refer to tasks that are pointless and unrewarding.

1 The myth
- 1.1 "Sisyphean task" or "Sisyphean challenge"
2 Interpretations
3 Peripheral references
4 See also
5 References

[edit] The myth

Sisyphus was son of the king Aeolus of Thessaly and Enarete, and the founder/first king of Ephyra (Corinth). He was the father of Glaucus by the nymph Merope, and the grandfather of Bellerophon. 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.

Sisyphus promoted navigation and commerce, but was avaricious and deceitful, violating the laws of hospitality by killing travelers and guests. He took pleasure in killing his guests because that would allow him to maintain his position at the top. 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 daughter of the river god Asopus; 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 his wife 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).

The Greek Underworld
Residents:
Persephone Hades Minos Aeacus	Rhadamanthus Charon Cerberus
Geography:
Acheron Cocytus Tartarus Lethe Elysion	Styx Phlegethon Asphodel Meadows Erebus
Famous inmates:
Ixion Sisyphus	Tantalus The Titans
Related:
Greek mythology	Greek religion

[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 his 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 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" as "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."

[edit] Peripheral references

Sisyphus is referenced in the song "Keep Fallin" by UK's geek-electro-pop band Hot Chip:

"I'm a rollin a rock up a steep-steep hill. When I reach the top it comes right back down. I meet Sisyphus when I hit the top. And we stroll back down together slowly"

He is also referenced in Joanna Newsom's song Only Skin:

"But always up the mountainside you're clambering,
groping blindly, hungry for anything;
picking through your pocket linings—
well, what is this?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?"

More recently, Marilyn Manson referred to the tale in "You And Me And The Devil Makes 3"

"I'm just like rolling a stone up a hill in the Hades"

In the Ulysses 31 episode, "The Eternal Punishment", a man called Sisyphus is forced to fill a crater with rocks (in the form of clustered debris) for eternity for seeking the secret to immortaily. In the episode, he tries to force Ulysses to replace him which echoes the story of the original's trickery of Thanatos. He later discovers that his task of filling the crater is a neverending one, as the rocks he destroys are merely recreated to be dropped into the crater again. The programme itself draws upon many of the famous Greek legends, using the same character names with a technological or futuristic twist to the original story.

Franz Kafka repeatedly referred to Sisyphus as a bachelor; the 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."^[3]