Sisyphos
September 18, 2008 by louisegeddes
Zeus, up to his usual tricks, hauls off a young lady named Aigina to the island that later bears her name. Apparently Sisyphos witnessed the abduction, and when the girl’s father goes looking for her, Sisyphos tells him that Zeus is the culprit.
The father of the gods is none too pleased at having his latest affair outed, and he sends Thanatos (Death) to collect Sisyphos. But the trickster manages to capture Thanatos, and for a time no mortal can die. Perhaps because wars can’t easily won without a tally of corpses, Ares eventually shows up to free Thanatos, who promptly nabs his captor.
Sisyphos, however, has one more trick up his sleeve. He instructs his wife Merope to skip the proper funerary rites. Hades the god of the Underworld is offended by this lack of protocol and sends Sisyphos back to scold her. Sisyphos is understandably tardy in arranging for a proper funeral, so he manages to live to old age and die a natural death.
When he shows up in the underworld, however, he finds a special place picked out for him, and a special punishment: his eternally rolling stone.
The plot of this myth as it was later written down sounds suspiciously like something out of a Greek comedy, and sure enough, a list of the lost works of Aischylos shows a few satyr plays with Sisyphos in the title. He may have started with an incomplete nugget of myth — Odysseus’ glimpse of Sisyphos and his rock in Homer’s Odyssey, and the general idea that Sisyphos was a man who tried to cheat death — and expanded it into a full-fledged story.
Greek mythology is like that: starting with Homer, authors shape and expand popular conceptions of the gods and myths. The stories are always changing, and the versions we now know are often the latest and most successful retellings of older myths.
That also explains why, in later fifth century authors and on Greek vases, there are suggestions that the wily hero Odysseus is a bastard of Sisyphos, not really the son of Laertes. In another of Aischylos’ plays, Ajax insults Odysseus by accusing him of being a bastard of Sisyphos, and like any juicy gossip, the story catches on.
(this is from Gantz, Early Greek Myths.