ABSURDE

According to the Iliad, Sisyphus lived in Ephyra (the future Corinth) and was the son of Aeolus (the eponymous ancestor of the Aeolians). When Zeus kidnapped Aegina, the daughter of the river-god Asopos, Sisyphus denounced the kidnapper to the girl’s father, thereby incurring the wrath of the king of the gods who decided to kill him. But when Death came for him, Sisyphus managed to chain him up and for a while no one died. It was necessary for Hermes to come down at last to the rescue of Death, and Sisyphus had to submit. However, he had previously taken care to order his wife, the Pleiades Merope, not to perform the ritual sacrifices and to leave his body unburied: so when he arrived in the Underworld, he was given permission to return to earth to punish her for this impiety. When he returned home, he resumed his existence, not worrying to return to Hades, and lived to a ripe old age. When he died for the second time, the Gods imposed a punishment that took up all his time in order to prevent him from inventing any escape: he was condemned to push a huge boulder up a hill for ever, which would roll back down the slope as soon as he had succeeded in hoisting it to the top.

According to a posthumous tradition, he is said to be the real father of Odysseus. In fact, Sisyphus was, like Prometheus, an extremely popular mythological character, the very type of cunning wily man, punished forever in Hades for having dared to deceive Death.