Sisyphus

----------

O why, Melanippus, do you pray you might be with me? or why, when once Fate has sent me to eddying Acheron, shall I hope to re-cross it and see again the pure light of the sun? Nay, set not your desire on things too great. King Sisyphus son of Aeolus, he thought with a craft unsurpassed to have escaped death; but for all his cunning he crossed the eddying Acheron in fate the second time, and the Son of Cronus [Zeus] ordained that he should have below a toil the woefullest in all the world. So I pray you bewail not these things. If ever cries were unavailing, our cries are unavailing now. Assuredly some of these things were to be suffered with an enduring heart. When the wind rises in the north [no skillful pilot puts out into the wide sea.]


- Fragment of a poem by Alcaeus sent to his friend Melanippus, taken from a "Second-Century Papyrus", translated by J.M. Edmonds


----------

And Sisyphus, son of Aeolus, founded Ephyra, which is now called Corinth, and married Merope, daughter of Atlas. They had a son Glaucus, who had by Eurymede a son Bellerophon, who slew the fire breathing Chimera. 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. 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.


- Pseudo-Apollodorus, The Library, Book 1, Chapter 9, Section 3


----------