The Gods Punished a Trickster Too Clever For His Own Good With an Eternity of Ceaseless Toil
In Greek legend, Sisyphus was a king of Corinth, and the founder of the Isthmian Games – one of the Ancient Greeks’ four major games, which included the Olympics. Sisyphus was the wisest of all men, and a cunning trickster who fathered the hero Odysseus, of Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey. Unfortunately, Sisyphus’ cunning was combined with questionable ethics, which got him in trouble with the gods, particularly with Zeus.
Sisyphus violated Xenia, the Ancient Greeks’ sacred laws of hospitality which protected travelers and guests, by murdering some of his guests to demonstrate his ruthlessness. That angered Zeus, whose divine responsibilities included the promotion of Xenia. On another occasion, Zeus kidnapped Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus. When her father went looking for her, Sisyphus told him where to find his daughter, in exchange for Asopus creating a spring to flow into Sisyphus’ city of Corinth. That snitching made Zeus angrier still.
Zeus sent the god of death to take Sisyphus and chain him into the underworld. Sisyphus however tricked the death god by asking him how the chains worked, and ended up chaining that deity. With Death chained, the mortally ill could no longer find release from earthly suffering, and no sacrifices could be made. The gods threatened Sisyphus with dire punishment if he did not free Death, so he reluctantly did.
However, Sisyphus had one more trick up his sleeve to cheat Death. He instructed his wife not to bury him or perform any of the sacred death rituals when he passed away, and to just throw his corpse out. She obeyed, and when Sisyphus arrived at the underworld, he begged Death to allow him to return to earth to punish his wife for her “impiety”. Death agreed, but once Sisyphus was back on earth, he jumped bail and went on the lam. He continued to live to a ripe old age, before dying a second time.
That was when Sisyphus discovered he had been too clever by half, and too smart for his own good. The gods were ticked off at him for showing them up and making them look like fools, and took offense at his self-aggrandizing deceitfulness, and the hubris of believing himself more cunning than Zeus. So they set out to make an example of him.
The gods thought, for some reason, that few punishments are more terrible than an eternity of futile and hopeless labor. So they condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of rolling a huge boulder up a steep hill. Soon as Sisyphus got his boulder to the top of the hill, it would roll down the other side, and he would have to go back down and collect his boulder to roll it up the hill again.