Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video, we’re going to discuss Sisyphus,
a man whose story embodies the adage ‘too clever for his own good’, a man
synonymous with the consequences of inciting the wrath of the gods, and a man whose fate
has become an enduring symbol of futility, eternal struggle, and meaningless tasks.
Alright, let’s get into it.
In Greek mythology, leaving gods aside for the moment, there is a small group of people
who became immortalized as superlatives. Orpheus was the greatest musician, able to charm animals,
even able to coax rocks and trees into movement. Hercules was the strongest man,
bearing the crushing weight of the heavens on his shoulders for a time. Daedalus was
the greatest inventor, creating the labyrinth in which the minotaur dwelt, and fashioning
wings for himself and his son Icarus so that they could escape from the labyrinth after
they were imprisoned inside. Sisyphus was the cleverest man - too clever for his own good,
as events would bear out in the fullness of time. He cheated death twice, first ambushing
and chaining Thanatos, death incarnate, who was sent to end his life, then once in the underworld,
convincing Hades to let him leave. In the end, what awaited most people in the underworld was
deemed too-low security for Sisyphus, so he was sent down to Tartarus and given an unending task,
making any future wily antics an impossibility. Though he would win himself more days in the sun,
his ultimate fate was perpetual punishment, not a great trade off.
First, we’re going to quickly go over a pastoral feud involving multiple instances of cattle theft,
the outcome of this showcasing Sisyphus’s cleverness. Second,
we’re going to go over the meat and potatoes, so to speak, of Sisyphus’s mythology,
which entails the betraying, tricking, ambushing, and chaining of gods, evading and escaping death,
and perpetual punishment in the form of forever rolling a boulder uphill.
Autolycus was the son of Hermes. He was endowed with the skills of a master thief,
unparalleled in this respect. In fact, his skills were far beyond those that
could be cultivated by a normal person. Even if he was caught after the fact,
it was nearly impossible to prove that he was the culprit. He could change the appearance
of what he stole, so even if he was chased down and challenged, it couldn’t be proved
that what was in his possession was actually someone else's property. If he made off with
another person’s animals, he could change the color of these animals, add or remove horns,
and so on. This was all working out amazingly for him, to the detriment and destitution of
those around him, but things would stop going so smoothly once he made an enemy of Sisyphus.
What happens next is described in Fabulae, a work attributed to Hyginus, who lived from the
mid-first century BC to the early-first century AD. He was a poet of modest talent compared to
the paragons of the past, such as Homer, and when compared to some of his contemporaries,
such as Ovid, but nonetheless, despite falling short of being counted among the
number of those who were truly great, his work is valuable today for keeping alive other works
that would otherwise be lost to the bygone centuries of antiquity. Here’s the passage:
“When he kept continually stealing from the herds of Sisyphus and couldn't be caught,
Sisyphus was convinced he was stealing because
Autolycus' number was increasing while his was growing smaller. In order to catch him,
he put a mark on the hooves of his cattle. When Autolycus had stolen in his usual way,
Sisyphus came to him and identified the cattle he had stolen by their hooves, and took them away."
Having glimpsed his cunning against Autolycus, let’s dive into Sisyphus’s
audacious exploits and escapades against the gods themselves. We’re going to begin
at the end and work backwards from there. Sisyphus’s punishment is described in the
Odyssey when Odysseus ventures down into the underworld, so this is where we’ll start.
The Odyssey is one of the epics attributed to the poet Homer, thought to have been penned sometime
in the 8th century BC. It tells of the hero Odysseus’s voyage home after the Trojan war.
In all, it took Odysseus 20 years to get home: 10 years spent fighting the Trojans and 10 years
spent trying to get home after the Trojans were defeated. (Incidentally, some accounts say that
Sisyphus is the father of Odysseus. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ajax uses this fact to insult
Odysseus while the two are quarreling over who will get Achilles’ armor.) In the Odyssey,
one of the main obstacles Odysseus has to overcome is the sorceress Circe. She transforms Odysseus's
crew into swine. It is only with the help of Hermes that Circe is successfully confronted. He
informs the hero about a herb that makes Odysseus impervious to Circe’s magic. Thus protected,
he forces the sorceress to make his crew human again. Though relations between the two could
scarcely have had a worse start, they became lovers. Odysseus is advised to venture into
the underworld to consult the spirit of a prophetess. It is here, while in the realm
of the dead, that he comes across Sisyphus, describing what he sees. Here’s the passage:
“And I saw Sisyphus too, bound to his own torture,
grappling his monstrous boulder with both arms working, heaving, hands struggling,
legs driving, he kept on thrusting the rock uphill toward the brink, but just as it teetered,
set to topple over – time and again the immense weight of the thing would wheel it back and the
ruthless boulder would bound and tumble down to the plain again – so once again he would heave,
would struggle to thrust it up, sweat drenching his body, dust swirling above his head.”
Where Sisyphus ended up is unequivocal, as for how he landed himself such a lamentable fate,
the burden of futile, back-breaking toil to be his lot for all of eternity,
is less clear, his road to ruin, the account of it, made ambiguous by many versions,
some of these lost to time and only alluded to in other works.
‘Bibliotheca’, or ‘The Library of Greek Mythology’, as the name is sometimes
rendered in English, is a compendium of Greek myths and one of our most important
sources of Greek mythology. Originally its authorship was attributed to Apollodorus,
an Athenian scholar of the second century BC; however, this ceased to be the prevailing
belief over time for reasons both temporal and stylistic. Today, it is believed that
‘The Library of Greek Mythology’ was written in either the first or second centuries AD, hundreds
of years after Apollodorus lived, but because the identity of the ‘real’ author isn’t known,
the author to whom the work is now attributed is Pseudo- Apollodorus, which basically means
“not actually written by Apollodorus but we don’t know who actually wrote it”.
Anyway, according to it, Sisyphus ended up in Tartarus for betraying Zeus. This account begins
with a river god named Asopos. He married the daughter of another river god, and together they
had many children: two sons and 20 daughters. One of these daughters, Aegina, caught Zeus’ eye. He
carried her off, and Asopos followed in pursuit. At this juncture, Asopos didn’t know the identity
of the abductor and was unsure exactly where his quarry was headed. His pursuit took him to
Corinth, where he learned from Sisyphus that the abductor was Zeus. Asopos was closing the gap,
but was eventually directly confronted, repelled, and chased off by Zeus, who hurled a barrage of
thunderbolts. Zeus took Aegina to an island and a son was later born to them. The name of their son
was Aeacos, and because he was all alone on the island, Zeus transformed the ants into people,
their number becoming the Myrmidons. Aeacos later married and sired two sons,
Peleus and Telamon. Peleus would later marry Thetis, a sea goddess and one of the Oceanids,
and born to them was Achilles, one of the most legendary heroes in all of Greek mythology,
second in power only to mighty Hercules, whose own power was so great and own accomplishments so
incredible that he was raised to godhood in the end, ascending from the fire of a funeral pyre.
The connection between Sisyphus informing on Zeus and ending up
in Tartarus is made earlier on in the work. Here’s the passage:
“[Sisyphus] suffers this punishment [forever rolling a boulder uphill] because of Aegina,
daughter of Asopos; for Zeus had carried her off in secret,
and Sisyphus is said to have revealed this to Asopos, who went in search of her.”
Beyond this, there is a far more elaborate account. It alludes to
Sisyphus informing on Zeus, using this as the impetus for subsequent events,
included in which are Sisyphus cheating death twice: first incapacitating death itself,
then convincing Hades to allow him to leave the underworld.
Sisyphus the Runaway, written by Aeschylus, is a Greek play. Unfortunately, this play is now
something lost to history. Fortunately, what the play is about is discussed in other works,
preserving for us a general outline. What happens in it is discussed by Pherecydes, a mythographer
of the 5th century BC. His discussion, though, the entirety of it, is also lost to history,
only fragments surviving through to today. In short, what we have are fragments from a mostly
lost work describing the plot of another work that’s completely lost. The partially extant
work of Pherecydes ties-in Sisyphus informing on Zeus to the river God with Thanatos (the
personification of death) being dispatched to kill Sisyphus. According to it, Thanatos was sent by
Zeus to kill Sisyphus for tipping-off Asopos, but instead of promptly separating soul from body as
he was used to, he was surprised, taken unawares, and bound. With death now out of commission,
the phenomenon of death ceased to affect the mortal world. People stopped dying,
and for a time, humanity was as deathless as the gods who dwelt atop lofty Olympus. Ares,
the god of war, was dispatched by Zeus to bring the situation under heel. He freed
Thanatos and then delivered Sisyphus to him. However, even in the grip of death’s clutches,
Sisyphus was still one step ahead. He had the forethought to previously instruct his wife
Merope to do away with the proper funeral rites. This deprived Hades of his customary offerings
and opened the door for Sisyphus's escape from the underworld. He convinced Hades that his wife was
derelict in her duties, neglecting to carry out his funeral rites, and must be reprimanded. Hades
agreed and Sisyphus departed, making his way back to the land of the living under the pretense of
confronting and castigating his wife. Once there, though, he refused to leave, and yet another god
had to be dispatched. Eventually Hermes tracked him down and brought him back to the underworld.
This account is corroborated by another earlier fragment, this one a fragment of lyric poetry
attributed to the poet Alcaeus, who lived from the late 7th to the early 6th century BC. Lyric,
along with others like drama and epic, was one of the main categories of ancient Greek poetry.
Tracing the etymology of the word ‘lyric’, it comes from the Latin word ‘Lyricus’,
which is a latinization of the Greek word ‘lurikos’, meaning something like ‘form of lyre’;
and ‘lurikos’, in turn, is derived from the Greek word ‘Lura’ or ‘lyra’, meaning lyre,
a stringed instrument that was popular in the time of Ancient Greece. Here’s the passage:
“King Sisyphus, son of Aeolus, wisest of men, supposed that he was master of Thanatos (Death);
but despite his cunning he crossed eddying Acheron twice at fate’s command.”
The Acheron is one of the rivers of the underworld. Both it and the river Styx,
depending on the source, are said to be the river souls crossed to enter
into the underworld proper. Taking this into account, when it says,
"he crossed eddying Acheron twice at fate’s command,” what it means is that Sisyphus crossed
over into the underworld two times. According to ‘Sisyphus the Runaway’, he convinced Hades
to let him leave after the first time, and the second time he ended up in Tartarus.
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