The Tragedy Of Sisyphus In Greek Mythology Explained

Greek mythology has no shortage of larger-than-life heroes, including the Olympian gods like Zeus and Hera, heroic demigods like Heracles and Perseus, and terrifying monsters like Medusa and Cerberus. But among these major players are hundreds of minor characters, filling in the edges or just existing to tell us where a certain type of flower came from. One of these minor characters, however, is better known for what he does in death than anything he did in life: Sisyphus, arguably the most famous inhabitant of Tartarus, the gloomy region of the Underworld where sinners are eternally punished.

But while the image of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill only for it to roll back down again is well known, other facets of his life remain obscure. Who was he? What did he do to get punished like that? And what can his story teach us about the human condition?

Sisyphus came from a pretty notable family. According to the mythological work known as the "Library," falsely attributed to Apollodorus, Sisyphus was only a few generations away from Deucalion, the man sometimes called the Greek Noah, as he and his wife Pyrrha were the ones who survived when Zeus flooded the world and were responsible for repopulating humanity. Their son was named Hellen, after whom Greece was named ("Greece" in Greek is Hellas, the Greeks are Hellenes), and Hellen's sons included Aeolus, who became the king of Thessaly. (If you recognize his name from the "Odyssey," you might assume that Aeolus also became king of the winds, but that is a different guy with the same name.) Sisyphus, then, was one of four sons of Aeolus (though this varies from source to source), all of whom, despite being great kings, came to various tragic ends.

Sisyphus, however, was the cause of his own undoing. As GreekMythology.com explains, Sisyphus was the founder of a city called Ephyra, later known as Corinth, which he managed through his legendary shrewdness to build into a great commercial center and seaport. However, he was also extremely deceitful and ruthless, often killing his guests for financial gain. Such actions are violations of the Greek concept of xenia, the sacred relationship between host and guest, of which Zeus himself is directly the guardian. This would not be the last time Sisyphus angered Zeus, though.

While Sisyphus was notorious for his violations of xenia and for trying to murder his brother via procreation, neither of these are the crimes for which he is so famously punished in the realm of Tartarus. The thing that ultimately got Sisyphus into "most famous person in Hell"-level territory was the sin of ratting out Zeus when he was with a lady. In this particular instance out of hundreds, the lady in question was Aegina, whom Theoi describes as a nymph who was the daughter of the river god Asopus. Zeus, desiring this fair maiden, disguised himself as an eagle and absconded with her to an island that would subsequently bear her name. Asopus chased after the bird-shaped god abducting his daughter but couldn't find them. His searches eventually brought him to Corinth, where he asked King Sisyphus if he had seen anything.

Sisyphus refused to tell Asopus anything until the god granted his request of creating a freshwater spring on Corinth's acropolis. Once the god acquiesced, Sisyphus told Asopus he had seen a giant bird flying with a young maiden to a nearby island. Asopus then tracks Zeus down, but Zeus chases him back to his river with a barrage of thunderbolts. It is thus ultimately snitching for which Sisyphus is eternally punished, though his crimes aren't done yet, not by a long shot.

At this point you're likely thinking, "Well, that's it for old Sisyphus. He had a good run, but now he is definitely dead and being punished like he's famous for." Well, think again. As GreekMythology.com explains, before he was dragged off to the Underworld by Thanatos, Sisyphus told his wife Merope to throw his dead body naked and uncovered into the middle of the town square. Fans of Greek mythology will know that the soul of an unburied body will not be allowed to cross the river Styx into the Underworld, and thus their ghost will be doomed to wander aimlessly on its banks. Such is what happened to Sisyphus, to the frustration of the gods.

The queen of the Underworld, Persephone, approached Sisyphus and asked him what had happened. He said that his foolish wife must have neglected to bury him properly, and that it would be a simple enough matter for him to pop back home and scold her until she had given him a funeral. Persephone, convinced by this argument for some reason, agreed to send Sisyphus back home. Naturally, instead of telling his wife to bury him and returning to the Underworld, Sisyphus stayed at home and just kept on being alive. Eventually, however, Persephone figured out that she had been tricked, and Hermes, the conductor of the dead, was sent to personally escort Sisyphus to the Underworld, for good this time.

While Sisyphus might be the most famous of the cleverly-punished denizens of Tartarus, he's far from the only one. The colorful punishments of Hades are often trotted out when mythological figures such as Orpheus or Aeneas make a descent into the Underworld. The "Odyssey" describes Odysseus seeing quite a few such tortured souls when he journeys to the house of Hades to consult with the ghost of the seer Tiresias, including the Titan Tityus, who, like Prometheus, has his liver eaten by vultures every day, only for it to regrow in the night.

However, there are a couple of tortured souls in Hades whose punishments reflect futility and frustration just as Sisyphus's rolling rock does. One of these is Tantalus, who was punished both for stealing the holy food of the gods when invited to their table (a violation of xenia) and for killing and cooking his son Pelops and serving him to the gods (he got better) by being made to eternally hunger and thirst while standing in a pool of water under a fruit tree with both water and food just out of reach (the source of the English word tantalize). The other example is the 49 daughters of Danaus condemned, for the crime of murdering their husbands on their wedding night, to try to fill a tub to wash away their crimes with water carried in a leaking sieve.

So ... great. We've gone over the story from Sisyphus's birth to death and then second death and then third death and then some. But what does this story mean? Sure, there's a moral in there about not trying to outsmart the gods, don't think you can escape mortality, and so on. But, like, why the rock? Where did the image of a man eternally and vainly rolling a rock up a hill come from? Considering that the punishment appears in the earliest mentions of Sisyphus (the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey") and the stories of how he got there only show up later, it stands to reason that the image of a man pushing a rock came first and the justification was a retcon by later mythographers.

Many myths begin as an attempt to explain natural phenomena, and the story of Sisyphus may be no exception. The Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that for some comparative mythologists, the perpetual rolling up and rolling down of Sisyphus's stone is reflective of the rising and the setting of the sun (though it might be worth noting that for a while in the 19th century, some comparative mythologists thought everything was about the sun). For others, however, it represents different cyclical, periodic natural phenomena, such as rising and falling waves, inhalation and exhalation, or humanity's futile but persistent pursuit of knowledge.

Sisyphus is not the only mythological figure put into an endlessly futile existence as a result of his own actions. One such figure is Naranath Bhranthan from Malayalam folklore in southern India, whom Onmanorama calls an "illustrious rebel." Naranath was the son of a Brahmin scholar, one of 12 children who all excelled in their various pursuits in life. While there are a number of stories about Naranath Bhranthan, the one that concerns us now is his strange boyhood hobby: rolling enormous stones up the hill near his house and laughing as they rolled back down. There is to this day a hill with a large boulder on top of it said to be his doing known as Bhranthan kunnu, or "madman's hill," presuming that you'd have to be crazy to do Sisyphus work for fun.

A similar story is told in Chinese folklore about Wu Gang the woodcutter. According to the Daily China, Wu Gang angered the emperor with his laziness, so the emperor sentenced him to cut down a cherry tree that he had planted on the moon, telling him that as soon as he finished, he would be a god. It was, of course, a magical tree that regenerated as Wu Gang chopped it. They say that every Mid Autumn Festival you can see and hear Wu Gang endlessly hacking away at a tree that will never fall.