510 BCE and now in the British Museum, a scene of Sisyphus' punishment is captured. On one Athenian black-figure amphora, dating to c. The Underworld was a relatively rare subject for Greek vase painters, but there are a dozen or so vases from the 6th century BCE showing Sisyphus. Only the intervention of Ares resolved the crisis, and Death was freed to pursue his natural work. In the first episode the king, after dying and descending into Hades, audaciously managed to capture Thanatos, the personification of Death, and chain him up so that no humans died thereafter. He gained infamy for his trickery and wicked intelligence, but his greatest feat was to cheat death and Hades himself, not once but twice, thus living up to Homer's description of him as "the most cunning of men" ( Iliad, 6:153). Sisyphus is credited with being the founder and first king of Corinth. He was the son of Aeolus, described by Homer as a human who rules the winds. In Greek mythology, the story of Sisyphus has multiple and often contradictory versions with embellishments added over time so that the only point of certainty is his terrible punishment. The adjective Sisyphean denotes a task which can never be completed. Founder of the Isthmian Games and grandfather of Bellerophon, he is nowadays best remembered as a poignant symbol of the folly of those who seek to trifle with the natural order of things and avoid humanity's sad but inescapable lot of mortality. He ultimately got his comeuppance when Zeus dealt him the eternal punishment of forever rolling a boulder up a hill in the depths of Hades. Sisyphus (or Sisyphos) is a figure from Greek mythology who, as king of Corinth, became infamous for his general trickery and twice cheating death.
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