Sisyphus of Corinth: The King Before the Stone

Above modern Corinth rises Acrocorinth, a great grey rock that once carried the city’s citadel. The geographer Strabo, describing the place in the age of Augustus, mentions a spot called the Sisypheion, where considerable remains of a temple or palace of white marble could still be seen. No one can point to it now with confidence, but the name tells us how Corinthians remembered the man. Before he was the Underworld’s most famous prisoner, Sisyphus was their king, and in the oldest stories his stone is only the last chapter of a long and lively career.

The most cunning of men

Homer introduces him almost in passing. In the sixth book of the Iliad, the Lycian warrior Glaucus recites his ancestry to Diomedes: there is a city called Ephyra, in a corner of horse-rearing Argos, where Sisyphus lived, “the most cunning of men”, son of Aeolus and father of another Glaucus, whose son was the hero Bellerophon. The Greek word, kerdistos, means something like “the one with the sharpest eye for advantage”. It is not quite praise and not quite blame.

Later Greeks identified Ephyra with Corinth, and the stories gather around the city’s strategic gifts. Apollodorus makes Sisyphus its founder and marries him to Merope, one of the daughters of Atlas. Pausanias, touring the Corinthia, credits him with founding the Isthmian Games in honour of the drowned boy Melicertes, whose body a dolphin carried ashore at the Isthmus. Pausanias also preserves the story of the spring. When Zeus carried off Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus, Sisyphus knew who had done it, and he would tell only at a price: water for his citadel. Asopus gave him a spring on Acrocorinth, and Sisyphus named the abductor.

It is a king’s bargain, shrewd and civic-minded, and according to Apollodorus it is the reason for his punishment. He sold a god’s secret to buy his city a water supply.

Other tales show the same sharp eye. The Latin handbook of myths that goes under the name of Hyginus tells how the master thief Autolycus kept stealing Sisyphus’s cattle and disguising them, until Sisyphus marked the animals’ hooves and proved the theft. In some versions he also seduced Autolycus’s daughter Anticleia, which allowed later playwrights to sneer that her son Odysseus was really the son of Sisyphus. The insult was a backhanded compliment: cleverness like that had to come from somewhere.

The man who chained Death

The most famous episode survives only in summaries, chiefly a story from the early mythographer Pherecydes quoted by later commentators on Homer. Zeus, angry at being informed against, sent Death to fetch Sisyphus. Sisyphus bound Death in strong chains, and for a time no one on earth could die, until Ares freed Death and handed Sisyphus over. Even then he had a plan. Before dying he told his wife not to perform the customary rites. In the Underworld he complained of her neglect and won leave to return and punish her. Back in the sunlight, he simply stayed, and lived to old age.

The lyric poets knew this story well. Alcaeus, writing around 600 BCE, calls Sisyphus a king who thought himself wiser than all men, yet who crossed the eddying Acheron twice; the second crossing implies the first escape. The elegiac verses that go under the name of Theognis say that he came back up from Hades by persuading Persephone with coaxing words. For these poets, Sisyphus is the man who out-argued the dead.

A stone with no shame

Only then does Homer show us the boulder. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, Odysseus, at the edge of the land of the dead, sees the great sinners at their torments, Sisyphus among them.

Bracing hands and feet, he drove the stone up toward the crest, but just as he would tip it over the top, its weight swung it back, and down to the plain again rolled the shameless stone.

Homer, Odyssey (our rendering)

Homer gives no reason for the punishment, and later authors supplied several: the betrayal of Zeus’s secret, the chaining of Death, the trick played on Persephone. The sources do not agree, and perhaps they did not need to. The one fixed point is that the stone matches the man. A king who never accepted a final answer is given a task that never ends.

For readers of marble there is something else in the image. Homer’s word for the boulder, anaides, “shameless”, gives the rock a will of its own. A sculptor’s block eventually becomes a figure; Sisyphus’s block never becomes anything. It is raw material without a maker, labour without a finished work. In his own city, the Corinthians hauled whole ships across the Isthmus on a paved stone track, the Diolkos, so they knew what dragging weight uphill felt like. Artists who pictured the Underworld, from Polygnotus in his great painting at Delphi, described by Pausanias, to the vase painters who show Sisyphus bent beneath his rock, kept close to Homer’s scene.

Camus at the foot of the hill

In 1942, in occupied France, Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay on how to live without the comfort of ultimate meaning. He drew openly on the ancient stories: the chained Death, the test of the wife, the return to the sunlit world. Camus imagines that once Sisyphus had seen the earth again, its water and sun, its warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back into the dark. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life, Camus writes, earned him his punishment.

What interests Camus most is a moment Homer does not describe: the walk back down. As the stone rolls to the plain, Sisyphus follows it, and that interval, like a pause for breath, is his hour of consciousness. He knows the whole extent of his condition, and in knowing it he rises above his fate. The essay ends with its famous sentence, which we render: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Camus has been accused of making the myth too comfortable, but he grasped something the ancient sources share. In every version, the stone is the price of intelligence, not the proof of stupidity. The king of Corinth is punished because he was clever enough to bargain with rivers, bind Death and talk Persephone round. He appears in the same Homeric passage as Minos, the guilty king of the Minotaur’s story, and his city later became the setting for a darker tale of seduction, told in our article on Lamia. If you want to see the ancient idea of heroic weariness in marble, the leaning Farnese Hercules in our Sculpture Room makes a good companion: a body resting between labours, which is exactly the moment Camus asked us to imagine.