If you’ve heard of Sisyphus before, you may or may not recall that he supposedly cheated death. You probably remember him as the poor sap from Greek mythology who’s stuck rolling a boulder up a hill for all eternity. But how did he end up there? According to the ancient writer Homer, Sisyphus thought he could outfox the gods of Olympus. Through the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer narrates his fascinating and yet tragic tale.
How Sisyphus Chained Up Death
Historian Mark Cartwright recounts Sisyphus’s fascinating tale in the World History Encyclopedia. As a king of ancient Corinth, Sisyphus was both intelligent and mischievous. He also had a bad habit of angering Zeus. This philandering king of the gods once kidnapped Aegina, the daughter of the river deity Asopus. True to form, Zeus turned into an animal—an eagle in this instance—and carried the nymph off to a nearby island. But good old Sisyphus had witnessed the abduction and told Asopus where he could find his daughter.
Furious about the whole affair, Zeus ordered Sisyphus to be chained in Hades as punishment. Yet Sisyphus managed to escape. Homer’s Iliad says that he pulled off this feat by restraining Thanatos. Being a mortal, Sisyphus didn’t overwhelm Thanatos by force. Instead, he asked Thanatos how the chains worked. GreekMythology.com explains that during the demonstration, Sisyphus ensnared the immortal being with those same chains.
Since Thanatos was Death personified, humans stopped dying while he was in captivity. The ruse finally ended when Ares rescued Thanatos. Ares, of course, had a vested interest: people stopped dying in his wars. Once he freed Thanatos, the annoyed God of War handed Sisyphus over to the latter’s custody.
Back to His Old Tricks Again
If you thought that episode with Thanatos is the last we’d see of Sisyphus, think again. Apparently, he’d given instructions to his wife Merope beforehand: she was to leave his dead body unburied. Some versions of this story claim that he told Merope to toss his body in the middle of Corinth’s city square. Either way, Encyclopedia Britannica mentions that he was allowed to leave the underworld. How? By convincing Persephone, Hades’ wife, that he needed to have a few words with Merope about his proper burial.
After returning to the land of the living, Sisyphus managed to elude death. As Cartwright points out, Thanatos stayed away from him to avoid another trap. Sisyphus lived out the rest of his life, refusing to return to the realm of the dead.
Sisyphus’ Eternal Fate
Once again, Zeus was enraged at the Corinthian king’s antics. As for what next lay in store for the trickster, think of the 2009 horror film Drag Me to Hell—except the Olympian god Hermes was tasked with the job. Zeus wanted to make an example of Sisyphus, to ensure that no one else attempted the same stunts ever again. The man’s punishment should be monotonous and tiresome, Zeus reasoned. After all, Sisyphus’s sentence would last for eternity.
Homer’s Odyssey shows Sisyphus in Hades again. This time, there was no escape. He had only one companion: a giant boulder. Every day, Sisyphus was forced to push the mammoth rock up a hill. But just before he could loft it onto the hilltop, its weight would send it tumbling backward. No matter how much he labored, he would never get the boulder completely up the hill.
Sisyphus’s Legacy in Modern Times
Ancient Greek audiences would have seen Sisyphus’s story as a cautionary tale against hubris or excessive pride that knew no limits. Yet his astonishing legend gives us a modern idiom: “a Sisyphean task.” One can spend a lot of time on fruitless efforts that will never yield results. Pride can fuel those efforts, so it’s up to each of us to figure out when persistence will pay off—and when it won’t.