Sisyphus (Song)

Sisyphus was the founder and first king of Corinth.
King Sisyphus promoted navigation and commerce but was avaricious and deceitful.
He killed guests and travelers in his palace, a violation of guest-obligations, which fell under Zeus' domain, thus angering the god.
Sisyphus took pleasure in these killings because they allowed him to maintain his iron-fisted rule.

Sisyphus and his brother Salmoneus were known to hate each other, and Sisyphus consulted the Oracle of Delphi on just how to kill Salmoneus without incurring any severe consequences for himself.
Sisyphus was famed as the craftiest of men.
He seduced Salmoneus' daughter Tyro in one of his plots to kill Salmoneus, only for Tyro to slay their children when she discovered that Sisyphus was planning on using them to eventually dethrone her father.

Sisyphus betrayed one of Zeus' secrets to the river god Asopus, in return for causing a spring to flow on the Corinthian acropolis.

Zeus ordered Thanatos to chain Sisyphus in Tartarus.
Sisyphus was curious as to why Charon, whose job it was to guide souls to the underworld, had not appeared on this occasion.
Sisyphus slyly asked Thanatos to demonstrate how the chains worked.
As Thanatos was granting him his wish, Sisyphus seized the opportunity and trapped Thanatos in the chains instead.
Once Thanatos was bound by the strong chains, no one died on Earth, causing an uproar.
Ares, the god of war, became annoyed that his battles had lost their fun because his opponents would not die.
The exasperated Ares intervened, freeing Thanatos, enabling deaths to happen again and turned Sisyphus over to him.

Before Sisyphus died, he had told his wife to throw his naked corpse into the middle of the public square.
This caused Sisyphus to end up on the shores of the river Styx when he was brought to the underworld.
Complaining to Persephone that this was a sign of his wife's disrespect for him, Sisyphus persuaded her to allow him to return to the upper world.
Once back in Corinth, the spirit of Sisyphus scolded his wife for not burying his body and giving it a proper funeral as a loving wife should.
When Sisyphus refused to return to the underworld, he was forcibly dragged back there by Hermes.

As a punishment for his crimes, Hades made Sisyphus roll a huge boulder endlessly up a steep hill in Tartarus.
The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself.
Hades accordingly displayed his own cleverness by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from Sisyphus before he reached the top which ended up consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration.