#parting

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus or Sisyphos is the founder and king of Ephyra. He reveals Zeus's abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus, thereby incurring Zeus's wrath. His subsequent cheating of death earns him eternal punishment in the underworld, once he dies of old age. The gods forced him to push an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity. Through the classical influence on contemporary culture, tasks that are laborious, futile, and never-ending are therefore described as Sisyphean. In other versions of the myth, Sisyphus was the true father of Odysseus by Anticleia instead of Laërtes. Cheating Death Sisyphus betrayed one of Zeus's secrets by revealing the whereabouts of the Asopid Aegina to her father, the river god Asopus, in return for causing a spring to flow on the Corinthian acropolis. Zeus ordered Thanatos to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus. But Sisyphus sensed him coming, and seized the opportunity to trap Thanatos himself in chains instead. Once Thanatos was bound by the strong chains, no one died on Earth, causing an uproar. Ares, the god of war, perhaps annoyed that his battles had become less diverting bc his opponents would not die, intervened & freed Thanatos, enabling deaths to happen again, and turned Sisyphus over to him. In some versions Hades was sent to chain Sisyphus and was chained himself. As long as Hades was trapped, nobody could die. Consequently, sacrifices could not be made to the gods, and those that were old & sick were suffering. The gods finally threatened to make life so miserable for Sisyphus he would wish he were dead. He then had no choice but to release Hades. Before Sisyphus died, he had told his wife to throw his naked corpse into the middle of the public square (purportedly as a test of his wife's love for him). This caused Sisyphus to end up on the shores of the river Styx when he was brought to the underworld. Complaining to either Hades or Persephone this was a sign of his wife's disrespect for him, Sisyphus persuaded her to allow him to return to upper world, in order to scold his wife for not burying his body and giving it a proper funeral as a loving wife should. But when back in the world of the living, Sisyphus refused to return to the Underworld. He returned many years later either from dying of advanced age, or being forcibly dragged back there by Hermes. In another version of the myth, Persephone was tricked by Sisyphus that he had been conducted to Tartarus by mistake, and so she ordered he be released. In Philoctetes by Sophocles, there is a reference to the father of Odysseus (rumoured to have been Sisyphus, and not Laërtes, whom we know as the father in the Odyssey) upon having returned from the dead. Euripides, in Cyclops, also identified Sisyphus as Odysseus's father.