[3]
And Sisyphus, son of Aeolus, founded Ephyra,
which is now called Corinth,1 and married Merope, daughter of
Atlas. They had a son Glaucus, who had by Eurymede a son Bellerophon, who slew the fire
breathing Chimera.2 But Sisyphus is
punished in Hades by rolling a stone with his hands and head in the effort to heave it
over the top; but push it as he will, it rebounds backward.3 This punishment he
endures for the sake of Aegina, daughter of
Asopus; for when Zeus had secretly carried her off, Sisyphus is said to have betrayed the
secret to Asopus, who was looking for her.
1 Compare Hom. Il. 6.152ff.; Paus. 2.1.1.
2 As to Bellerophon and the Chimera, see Apollod. 2.3.1, with the note.
3 As to Sisyphus and his stone, see Hom. Od. 11.593-600. Homer does not say why Sisyphus was thus punished, but Paus. 2.5.1 and the Scholiast on Hom. Il. i.180 agree with Apollodorus as to the crime which incurred this punishment. Hyginus assigns impiety as the cause of his sufferings （Hyginus, Fab. 60）. The picturesque story of this cunning knave, who is said to have laid Death himself by the heels, so that nobody died till Ares released Death and delivered Sisyphus himself into his clutches （Scholiast on Hom. Il. vi.153）, was the theme of plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. See TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 74ff., 251, 572; The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. A. C. Pearson, vol. ii. pp. 184ff. Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants at Athens, is credited with a play on the same theme, of which a very striking fragment, giving a wholly sceptical view of the origin of the belief in gods, has come down to us. See Sextus Empiricus, ed. Bekker, pp. 402ff.; TGF (Nauck 2nd ed.), pp. 771ff.
Apollodorus. Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1921. Includes Frazer's notes.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.