Sisyphus

The craftiest of mortals, son of Aeolus and founder and king of Ephyra (later Corinth). When Zeus carried off the nymph Aegina, Sisyphus told her father, the river-god Asopus, where she had been taken — earning the king of gods' wrath (Apollod. *Bibl.* 1.9.3). A later tradition makes his cunning greater still: he chained Death (Thanatos) so that no mortal died, and tricked Persephone into letting him return from the underworld. For his trickery he was condemned in Hades to the most famous of punishments — Odysseus sees him heaving a great stone up a hill, which rolls back down each time it nears the top, the labour beginning forever again (Hom. *Od.* 11.593–600).

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