Sisyphus

Sisyphus is the mythic trickster invoked in the novel to link ingenuity with excess, punishment with time, and apparent defeat with the prospect of escape. Bubis’s account ranges from the thefts and family intrigues of Sisyphus’s life to his capture of Death and eventual punishment; Archimboldi later answers Bubis with a version in which Sisyphus uses a legal stratagem to leave the underworld. Taken together, the stories make the stone not simply an emblem of futile labor but a limit imposed on an intelligence that may still be plotting its return.

The Craftiest of Men

Bubis’s digression begins as he considers the faces Junge is making. The association leads him to Sisyphus, whom he calls the craftiest of men and identifies as the son of Aeolus and Enarete, and founder of Ephyra, the old name for Corinth. In Bubis’s telling, Sisyphus’s defining habit is to treat turns of fate as problems to solve: he approaches life as if it were a chess game or a detective story, and his wit feeds a restless appetite for jokes, pranks, and schemes.

That ingenuity has a practical and self-serving edge. Sisyphus steals from passersby and even from Autolycus, a neighbor who is also a thief. He is also attracted to Autolycus’s daughter Anticlea, despite her promise to Laertes. Bubis’s account makes Autolycus an accomplice in the romance: while honoring his promise to Laertes, he does not oppose Sisyphus’s attentions. Anticlea eventually marries Laertes, but she has already conceived Sisyphus’s son. The child, Odysseus, inherits his father’s reputation for cleverness, though Sisyphus himself gives him no thought.

Excess, Conflict, and Punishment

Sisyphus’s life continues in excess. He marries Merope, the dimmest star in the Pleiades, whose marriage to a mortal is itself presented as a mark of disgrace. Bubis also recounts Sisyphus’s pursuit of Tyro, his brother Salmoneus’s daughter, not from love but from hostility toward his brother. In this portrait, cleverness does not make Sisyphus virtuous: it serves theft, indulgence, and the wish to wound another person.

His conflict with Zeus begins when he reveals to Asopus that Zeus has kidnapped Asopus’s daughter. Sisyphus offers the information in exchange for a fountain in Corinth; Asopus agrees, and the city gains a spring of fresh water. The bargain casts Sisyphus as both opportunist and civic benefactor, without resolving which description matters more. Zeus retaliates by sending him to Thanatos, or Death, but Sisyphus captures Thanatos and chains him. While Death is imprisoned, no human being dies, and people live without the usual anxiety of death—or, as Bubis’s account emphasizes, of time.

Zeus eventually intervenes, Thanatos is freed, and Sisyphus dies. In the underworld he is condemned to push a stone to the top of a hill, watch it roll back down, and begin again indefinitely. The punishment is described as a bitter sentence out of proportion to his crimes, imposed by Zeus’s vengeance. Another interpretation gives the labor a practical purpose: keeping Sisyphus occupied so that he cannot devise new schemes.

A Legal Stratagem and the Possibility of Return

A later version of the myth arrives in Archimboldi’s reply to Bubis. Archimboldi explains that before Zeus freed Thanatos, Sisyphus had instructed his wife not to perform the customary funeral rites. When Sisyphus reaches the underworld, Hades rebukes him for this omission, and the infernal lords are angered. Sisyphus argues that the fault belongs to his wife and asks permission to return to Earth to punish her and arrange the rites properly.

Hades grants the request on a limited condition: Sisyphus is to stay away for only three or four days. The apparent concession becomes the opening for another escape. Sisyphus returns to Earth, lives there to old age, and does not go back to the underworld until his body fails him. Archimboldi thus reframes the afterlife episode as a contest of argument and interpretation. Sisyphus does not overpower Hades; he persuades him by presenting an appeal that sounds reasonable, then exploits the permission he has been given.

Archimboldi connects this escape to the punishment of the stone. Some people, he writes, say the task exists to keep Sisyphus from hatching new plans. Yet even under that constraint, Sisyphus will devise something at the least expected moment and return to Earth. The stone’s repetition therefore carries a double meaning: it is an imposed cycle, but not proof that the cycle has exhausted the prisoner’s intelligence.

Narrative Function

The two accounts give Sisyphus distinct but complementary roles. In Bubis’s recollection, he is an ingenious offender whose schemes range from petty theft to an exchange that brings a fountain to Corinth, and from defying Death to provoking Zeus’s retaliation. Archimboldi’s letter shifts the emphasis from the familiar punishment to an episode of negotiated escape. The myth remains unsettled between punishment and reprieve, between the power that confines Sisyphus and the resourcefulness that keeps imagining a way out.

The allusion also gives the novel a language for thinking about time. Bubis’s version links Thanatos’s imprisonment to a world without death anxiety and with surplus time to read and think. The later story makes time negotiable in another way: a sentence of only three or four days becomes, through Sisyphus’s return, a lifetime. Sisyphus’s significance lies not in a single stable moral but in the repeated collision between cunning and consequence. Even when the stone falls, the story leaves open the possibility that its bearer is still thinking.