Sisyphus

Sisyphus founded Corinth and was, by every account, the craftiest man alive — which in Greek myth is a warning rather than a compliment. He killed guests, which violated the deepest of Greek obligations, and he informed on Zeus, telling a river god that Zeus had carried off his daughter.

Zeus sent Thanatos, death himself, to chain him in the Underworld. Sisyphus asked Thanatos to demonstrate how the chains worked, and locked him in them. With Death in a cupboard nobody on earth could die — a situation that particularly annoyed Ares, who found that battles had stopped being decisive. Ares freed Thanatos and handed Sisyphus over personally.

He had already prepared his second escape. He had told his wife to leave his body unburied and perform no funeral rites; arriving in the Underworld, he complained to Persephone that his wife had neglected him and asked for three days to go back and set it right. He was granted them, and simply did not return. They had to come and get him again, years later.

The punishment was designed by someone who had thought about him. He must roll a boulder up a hill, and each time it nears the top it rolls back down. It is not painful. It is not frightening. It is merely pointless, forever — the one thing a mind like his has no way to outwit.

Camus made him the emblem of the twentieth century by arguing we should imagine him happy: the struggle itself is enough to fill a heart. That reading is entirely modern, and Homer, who has Odysseus watch him sweating with dust rising from his head, would not have recognised it.