Sisyphus

Sisyphus is the cunning king of Corinth who cheats death twice and is condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever in the underworld. Homer calls him the craftiest of men, and his endless labor has made 'Sisyphean' the word for any task that can never be finished.

Son of Aeolus, Sisyphus founds Ephyra, later called Corinth, and marries the Pleiad Merope, whose star, Ovid says, hides in shame because she alone of the seven wed a mortal; their son Glaucus is the father of Bellerophon. When the body of the boy Melicertes, son of Ino, washes ashore on the Isthmus, Sisyphus buries him and founds the Isthmian Games in his honor. His cunning is proverbial: when the thief Autolycus steals his cattle, he recognizes them by marks cut into their hooves, and some tragedians made him the true father of Odysseus by Autolycus' daughter Anticleia.

His offense against the gods begins with a secret. Zeus carries off Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus, and Sisyphus tells her father who took her, in exchange, Pausanias says, for a spring on the Acrocorinth. Zeus sends Death for him, but Sisyphus puts Thanatos in chains, and no one can die until Ares frees him, in Pherecydes' version. Before he is taken, Sisyphus forbids his wife to give him funeral rites; in the underworld he complains of her neglect, persuades Persephone, or Hades, to let him go back and punish her, and then stays in the light until old age.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus sees him in the underworld straining with hands and feet to push a huge stone up a hill; each time it is about to go over the top, its weight turns it back and it rolls down to the plain. Apollodorus says this is his punishment for betraying Zeus. He shares the depths with Tantalus and Ixion, and Ovid tells that when Orpheus sang there, Sisyphus sat down on his rock to listen. In 1942 Albert Camus made him the hero of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus.