Labouring for Eternity
How Sisyphus earned his futile ending, over and over again
Content warnings: mentions of rape and abuse, child murder, kidnapping
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The founder and king of Corinth (also known as Ephyra), King Sisyphus, was married to Merope, the youngest of the Pleiades nymph-sisters. Sisyphus was a shrewd businessman who grew his city to greatness, fostering it into a bustling trade hub. However, as can often be said of savvy businessmen, Sisyphus was also one of the worst examples of humanity.
He would regularly abuse both his people and his power, killing, raping and stealing from both his citizens and his guests in the magnificent palace he had built, all to show himself as a strong and ruthless leader. He was a king who frequently violated the most sacred tradition of the Greek gods: Xenia.
This was a custom valued above all others, detailing how a houseguest and host should behave towards each other. Under Xenia, hosts would offer up their finest food, wine and beds to visitors, treating them as an honoured guest even when they were unexpected strangers. This most revered of arts was presided over by Zeus himself, so to snub or mistreat one’s guests was tantamount to heresy itself; every time Sisyphus violated Xenia in relation to his guests, taking advantage of them or stealing from them, each act was a stain upon his reputation with both strangers and the gods.
Sisyphus had committed other acts of treachery under the watchful eye of the gods too. He shared a bitter hatred with his brother, Salmoneus, who had founded and now ruled over the city of Salmone in Pisatis. Sisyphus asked the Oracle of Apollo how to kill his brother and was told that if he had children with Salmoneus’ daughter, Tyro, those children would grow up to avenge Salmoneus’ and Sisyphus’ feud.
Sisyphus took this information to heart and duly went to seduce his niece. Tyro quickly got pregnant and gave birth to two sons, but when Sisyphus revealed to her his plan for their future, she was dismayed. To protect her father from her lover and uncle, Tyro killed her newborn sons to prevent their fated crimes.
Naturally, such a course of events was frowned upon by the gods. Sisyphus managed to make it even more personal, however, when he betrayed Zeus to another god. He witnessed Zeus kidnapping Aegina, the daughter of the river god Asopus. Sisyphus then approached the panicked Asopus and told him that he would reveal what had happened to his daughter if he would provide Corinth with a spring at the city’s Acropolis. Asopus did so and Sisyphus accordingly told him of Zeus’ misdeeds, revelling in the river god’s anger which rose with every word that fell from the mortal king’s mouth.
Asopus went to try and retrieve his daughter from Olympus but Zeus chased him off with a few well-placed thunderbolts. Nonetheless, Sisyphus’ betrayal of his secrets was the final straw for Zeus. Tired of the king’s continued and flagrant disrespect of the gods and his fellow man, Zeus dispatched Thanatos, the embodiment of death, to bring Sisyphus to the underworld and imprison him there.
Thanatos was one of the two gods who would ferry souls to the underworld and the banks of the River Styx. He had the majority of souls to harvest; Hermes would collect important and legendary souls, while every day Thanatos would guide the other shades tenderly into the shadowy maw of Hades. He was the son of Nyx, primordial goddess of the night, and Erebus, the primordial god of darkness, who had had twins together; one of these was Thanatos, while the other was Hypnos, the embodiment of sleep.
Thanatos did as Zeus had commanded and appeared to Sisyphus in his palace. He told the mortal king that he would be taken to the underworld for his crimes and be imprisoned there with a set of special shackles. Sisyphus, ever quick to come up with a solution, asked Thanatos how the chains would work. In Thanatos’ demonstration, Sisyphus tricked the god of death into wearing the chains, which the king quickly snapped shut around Thanatos’ wrists. He then closed death quietly away in a corner of the palace where nobody would go and went about his day as though nothing had happened.
With Thanatos in chains and imprisoned, he could no longer perform his duties as a reaper. No mortal could die with their souls remaining stuck in their bodies, which often left them in pain and suffering, peaceless. The flow of souls through the gates of the underworld had suddenly stopped while the mortal world was plagued with the still-living bodies of the dead. Battlefields, most notably, became arenas of pain and violence that offered no rest in death; this was something that Ares, god of war, was none too thrilled about.
As the men he watched strike each other down remained alive, Ares got more and more upset. He revelled in bloodshed and revenge, but it was only ever fun when there were stakes. Now that death had been stripped away, wars began to bore Ares, something he had never experienced before. He did not approve of this new feeling, so he went to ask Zeus if he knew what was going on.
Zeus was baffled by Ares’ report of the mortal realm. He summoned Hades, who confirmed that for some reason, there were no souls entering the underworld other than the few that Hermes would collect. Zeus told them that he had sent Thanatos to drag Sisyphus to the underworld but he’d heard nothing from him since then, assuming that death had completed his task and moved on to other mortals. Hades added that he hadn’t seen Thanatos since Zeus’ errand either, noticing no usual cold chill in the halls of his palace as would ordinarily be expected with Thanatos’ presence. On hearing that, Ares strode from his father’s throne room and headed down to Corinth to find death himself.
Ares’ visit to Sisyphus did not go as smoothly for the king as Thanatos’. Ares was well-versed in exactly which parts of the human body were most sensitive, so extracting Thanatos’ location proved a fairly easy task for him. He dragged the king with him through the halls of his palace, not caring about the startled looks he was attracting from Sisyphus’ servants. Ares freed Thanatos and made sure that this time, the shackles went on the correct pair of wrists and Sisyphus was taken directly to the underworld.
What Ares and Thanatos didn’t know was that Sisyphus had hatched another plan to avoid his fate. Knowing that the clock on his life was ticking after his capture of death, Sisyphus approached his wife, Merope, and told her of his impending fate. To her dismay, he made her promise that when he died she would perform none of the usual death rites; if she fulfilled this promise, then he would know that she loved him. She was to throw his body into the city’s main square with no ceremony, no funeral feast, no sacrifices and no obol under his tongue, the coin used by shades in the underworld to cross the River Styx and earn their way into the afterlife.
Merope loved her husband very much, so she followed his instructions to the letter. By the time Sisyphus’ spirit reached the banks of the Styx, his body was being splattered with mud and rainwater in the main square of Corinth. He used this state of affairs to beg an audience with Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, and succeeded, coming before her looking as wretched as possible. She had not heard of his exploits with the other gods and instead took pity on him.
He begged her to be allowed to return to the living, just for three days or so, to make sure that his wife paid dearly for treating his body as she had. He promised that he would make an example of her treatment and make sure that his city knew the proper way to worship the gods; with fear and reverence, making sacrifices to Hades and Persephone and filling their ears with praise. Persephone allowed the bedraggled Sisyphus this brief return to the mortal world, so he traipsed back to Corinth under her protection.
Merope was overjoyed to see her husband return from the dead and he thanked her for loving him so well as to follow his instructions. He reneged on his vow to return to the underworld, instead living out the rest of his natural life alongside his queen and ruling with an ever-iron fist over his city.
On Sisyphus’ reappearance in the underworld when he died a natural death several years later, Persephone was irate. She had long realised the trick he had pulled on her and demanded justice, appealing to Zeus to join her in punishing Sisyphus for eternity. Zeus was all too happy to take her up on her offer, sore from Sisyphus’ outrageous cheating of death amongst his other previous transgressions.
With a spring in his step, Zeus accompanied Hades and Persephone to rule over Sisyphus’ comeuppance. They bade Hermes to bring the disgrace of a king directly to their chamber so that they might provide him with an apt damnation for an eternity of pain.
Zeus presented the cocky Sisyphus with a choice: he could be processed like any other soul, likely going to Tartarus for his many and varied crimes, or he could simply roll a boulder up a hill. Sisyphus was promised that when he reached the top, he could return to the land of the living once again. He took one look at the large boulder and the steep incline and still believed his task an easy one, so naturally his hubris spoke for him and chose the path to the living.
Delighted, Zeus set Sisyphus to work and the gods left him there, stifling their laughter until they were out of earshot. Little did the arrogant Sisyphus know that he was already in Tartarus, and Hades, Zeus and Persephone would never let him free again. Sisyphus began rolling the boulder up the hill, only making it halfway before the rock merrily veered off course and rolled all the way back to the bottom of the climb.
Over and over again Sisyphus tried and failed to roll the boulder all the way to the top of the hill, every time believing himself a little closer to the summit. He never got the boulder to the top; even when he thought it was almost there, the rock would loose itself of his control and roll back down the hill. The chance of an exit, the hope of the way out that Zeus had promised him made the ever-conceited Sisyphus continue ceaselessly, always applying himself fully and in vain to his impossible task.
Merope, meanwhile, was slowly made aware of her husband’s misdeeds after his death. She was so ashamed of his actions and her role in helping him fool the gods that, as a star, she retreated from her position in the sky, leaving her sisters shining brightly in the Pleiades while she became elusive, fading the seventh star from view.