Sisyphus

The teaching

Taught from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the later Greek tellers and Albert Camus's essay of 1942.

The craftiest of men

Homer's first word of Sisyphus is of his cunning. In the Iliad he is the son of Aeolus, king of Ephyra in a corner of Argos where horses graze, the craftiest of men and grandfather of the hero Bellerophon. Later tellers make Ephyra into Corinth and him its founder, and give him a wife, Merope, one of the seven Pleiades, who shines the faintest of the sisters because she alone married a mortal. When the thief Autolycus steals his cattle and changes their look, Sisyphus knows them by the marks he has set under their hooves, and some add that he lay with the thief's daughter Anticleia, so that Odysseus was his son and not the son of Laertes.

The god and Death

Then he crosses the gods. When Zeus carries off Aegina, daughter of the river god Asopus, Sisyphus tells her searching father where she has gone, and takes a spring of water for the citadel of Corinth in payment. Zeus sends Death to fetch him, and Sisyphus binds Death in chains, so that for a while no one on earth can die, until Ares sets Death free and hands Sisyphus over to him.

Even then he has a trick left. Before he dies he tells his wife to leave his body unburied and make him no offerings, and when he comes below he complains that she has wronged him and begs leave to go back and punish her. Once in the daylight he refuses to return, and lives on to old age before he is fetched again. The poet Alcaeus sums it up: the wisest of men thought he had mastered death, yet for all his cleverness he crossed the river of the dead twice.

The stone

In the Odyssey, Odysseus among the dead sees him in hard torment, gripping a monstrous stone with both hands and thrusting it up a hill with hands and feet. Each time he is about to heave it over the crest its weight turns it back, and the pitiless stone rolls down again to the plain; and he strains to push it up once more, the sweat running from his limbs and the dust rising above his head. He stands among the great offenders, beside Tityos whose liver the vultures tear and Tantalus who can never drink, and Homer says nothing of why. When Orpheus sings in the underworld, Ovid tells, Sisyphus sits down on his stone to listen.

The stone in this life

The ancients read the punishments below as pictures of life above. Lucretius, who held that no one suffers after death, says that Sisyphus is here before our eyes: he is the man who seeks from the people the rods and axes of office and always goes away beaten and sullen, for to seek power, which is empty and never truly given, and to toil hard for it without end, is to push uphill a stone that rolls back from the very top and races down to the plain. Plato's Socrates notes that Homer's sufferers without end are kings and men of power, since power gives the most room for wrong, and counts among the joys of death the chance to meet Sisyphus and question him.

Camus: the absurd

Albert Camus begins from the one question he holds to be serious: whether life is worth living in a world that offers no meaning of its own. The absurd, he says, lies neither in us nor in the world but in their meeting, our longing for clarity faced with the world's silence. It is not to be escaped, neither by suicide nor by a leap of hope into a faith that denies it, but lived with open eyes, and from living it come three things: revolt, freedom and passion. Sisyphus is his absurd hero by his passions as much as by his torment: his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death and his love of life earned him the labour in which the whole being strives and accomplishes nothing.

The hour of the descent

What holds Camus is the walk back down. When the stone has rolled away and Sisyphus goes down after it, there is a pause like a breath, and that is the hour of consciousness: each time he leaves the heights he is stronger than his rock. His torment is that he knows, and the same clear knowledge is his victory, for there is no fate that scorn cannot overcome. The descent may be made in sorrow, and it may be made in joy. His fate belongs to him and his rock is his own, every grain of it a world, and the struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart.