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According to the massive Greek Mythology Link site in the Yahoo! Greek Mythology category, Sisyphus was a very crafty king who defied the gods and tried to elude death. His punishment in Hades was to endlessly roll a huge stone up a hill -- as soon as it reached the top, it would fall back to the bottom. The poor king spawned his own adjective, Sisyphean, meaning an impossible task. First, Sisyphus angered the gods by telling Asopus that Zeus had carried off his daughter, Aegina. Then when
Death came for Sisyphus, the king chained Death up, thus temporarily granting immortality to all of humanity (until the god Ares freed Death). Before Sisyphus was finally brought down to the underworld, he instructed his wife to leave his body unburied. This served as a good excuse to travel back up (in order to punish his wife), and he lived for a long time before dying again. By that time, however, he had run out of delay tactics and had built up a lot of bad blood down in Hades. This resulted in a cruel and unusual sentence. You can find more references to Sisyphus at GreekMythology.com's handy search engine. Homer
describes him thus: And I saw Sisyphus at his endless task raising his prodigious stone with both his hands. With hands and feet he tried to roll it up to the top of the hill, but always, just before he could roll it over on to the other side, its weight would be too much for him, and the pitiless stone would come thundering down again on to the plain. Talk about a fate worse than death.
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