The true story of the myth of Sisyphus, a metaphor for eternal renewal

His name is well known, even proverbial: "To do a Sisyphean task" or, more classically, "to roll one's rock" is to accomplish a difficult, painful, even absurd task. Few people, however, could recount the myth in which the gods condemned Sisyphus to eternally push a rock to the top of a mountain, from where the stone continually falls back. "From Antiquity to the present day, this image of the eternally punished has remained the same," observes Pierre Brunel, author of an essay devoted to the sources of the myth, Sisyphus, figures and myths , with Aeneas Bastian (Editions du Rocher, 2004).

The earliest known reference is found in Homer 's Odyssey ( ^8th century BC), and was popularized by Albert Camus with the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). "Between the two ," continues Pierre Brunel, "the punishment has not changed, but different interpretations have abounded."

The reasons why Sisyphus is condemned differ according to the authors, especially since Homer says nothing about it, contrary to what various mythologists have put forward, as well as Camus himself. If the poet writes only that Sisyphus was "the most skillful of men" , a later tradition paints a less flattering portrait of him: Aristotle judges, in The Poetics , that he was "skillful, but wicked" , Horace calls him "Sisyphus the deceitful" in Satires and Ovid writes, in Metamorphoses , that he was "treacherous and cowardly" .

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