‘Now, all you have to do is roll that boulder up the slope. When you reach the top, that hole will slide open. You will be able to climb out and live for ever as the immortal King Sisyphus. Thanatos will never visit you again.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it,’ said Hermes. ‘Of course, if you don’t like the idea I can take you to Elysium, where you will spend a blissful eternity in the company of other souls of the virtuous departed. But if you choose the stone you must keep trying until you have succeeded and won your freedom and immortality. Make your choice. An idyllic afterlife down here or a shot at immortality above.’
Sisyphus examined the boulder. It was bulky, but not colossally so. The slope was steep, but not precipitously. Forty-five degrees of gradient, but no more. So. An eternity skipping though the fields of Elysium with the dull and well behaved or eternity up above in the real world of fun, filth, frolic and frenzy?
‘No tricks?’
‘No tricks, no pressure,’ said Hermes, putting his hand on Sisyphus’s shoulder and flashing his most dazzling smile. ‘Your choice.’
You know the rest. Sisyphus put his shoulder to the boulder and began to push it up the slope. Halfway there and he was confident that life eternal was assured. Three-quarters done and he was tired, but not blown. Four-fifths and … damn, this was hard work. Five-sixths, pain. Six-sevenths, agony. Seven-eighths … He was within an inch of the top now, within a fingernail’s length, just one more supreme effort and … Noooooooo! The stone slipped, bounced over Sisyphus and rolled down to the bottom. ‘Well, not bad for a first effort,’ Sisyphus thought to himself. ‘If I take my time, if I conserve my strength, I can get there. I know I can. I’ll discover a technique. Maybe I’ll go up backwards, taking the weight on my back. I can do this …’
Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again. He will be there until the end of time. He still believes he can do it. Just one last supreme effort and he will be free.
Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.
Hubris
To the Greeks hubris was a special kind of pride. It often led mortals to defy the gods, bringing about inevitable punishment of one kind or another. It is a common, if not essential, flaw in the makeup of the heroes of Greek tragedy and of many other leading characters in Greek myth. Sometimes the failing is not ours but the gods’, who are too jealous, petty and vain to accept that mortals can equal or surpass them.
All Tears
You may remember that Pelops was not the only child of Tantalus and Dione. They also had a daughter, Niobe. Despite the terrible fate that befell her father and the bleak adventures of her brother, she was a proud, confident woman. She had met and married Amphion, the son of Zeus and Antiope. He was a former lover of Hermes, you may recall, one of the twins who had constructed the walls of Thebes, enchanting the stones with his singing and strumming of the lyre.fn1 Between them Niobe and Amphion had seven daughters and seven sons, the Niobids.
Swollen with dangerous levels of conceit and self-regard, Niobe liked to tell all who would listen how important she was and just how royal and divine her bloodlines were.
‘On my mother’s side I claim descent from Tethys and Oceanus – they’re first-generation Titans, you know. On my father’s side, well there’s TMOLUS, of course, the most highborn of all the Lydian mountain deities. My dear husband Amphion is a son of Zeus, and of Antiope, the daughter of King NYCTEUS, one of the original Theban Spartoi who sprang from the dragon’s teeth. So my darling sons and daughters really can boast the most distinguished lineage, one feels justified in saying, of any family in the world. Not that I ever allow them to boast, of course. The well bred are never puffed up.’
Such foolishness might have been no more than faintly sad were it not that Niobe even presumed to compare herself to the Titaness Leto, mother of gods. On the very day that the people of Thebes gathered annually to sing Leto’s praises and tell the story of Artemis and Apollo’s miraculous birth on Delos – on that very day, sacred to the Titaness and her dignity – Niobe unburdened herself of her haughtiest broadside.
‘I mean, I’d be the first to admit that Leto’s dear twins Artemis and Apollo are charming and fully divine, of course they are. But only two children? One girl and one boy? Good heavens, how she can even call herself a mother I fail to understand. And who’s to say that of my seven sons and seven daughters there won’t be some, if not all, who will ascend to divine and immortal rank?fn2 Given their birth I think it rather more likely than not, don’t you? In my view, celebrations of such a lazy, vulgar and unproductive mother as Leto are in extremely poor taste. Next year I shall make sure the festival is cancelled altogether.’
When word reached Leto that this jumped-up Theban was insulting her in such a fashion, and daring to set herself up over her, she burst into tears in front of her sympathetic twins.
‘That terrible, boastful, conceited woman,’ she choked. ‘She called me lazy for having only two children … She said I was unproductive … and she called me vulgar. She said she would prevent the people of Thebes from celebrating my f-f-festal day …’
Artemis put an arm round her while Apollo paced up and down, slamming the ball of his fist into his palm.
‘She has fourteen children,’ wailed Leto, ‘so I suppose, compared to her, I am inadequate …’
‘Enough!’ said Artemis. ‘Come, brother. She has made our mother weep. It is time this woman knew the meaning of tears.’
Artemis and Apollo went straight to Thebes, where they hunted down every one of Amphion’s and Niobe’s fourteen children. Artemis shot the seven daughters dead with her silver arrows; Apollo shot the seven sons dead with his golden ones. When Amphion was brought news of the slaughter he took his own life by falling on his sword. Niobe’s grief was also insupportable. She fled to her childhood home and found refuge on the slopes of Mount Sipylus. No matter how snobbish, reckless, proud and absurd she had been, such wretched and inconsolable unhappiness was terrible to behold. The gods themselves could not bear to hear her unceasing lamentations, and so turned her to stone. But not even solid rock had the power to hold back such tears as these. Niobe’s weeping pushed her tears through the stone and sent them cascading in waterfalls down the mountainside.
Even today, visitors to Sipylus, now called Mount Spil, can see the rock formation in which the outlines of a female face can still be discerned. In Turkish this is known as Ağlayan Kaya or ‘Weeping Rock’.fn3 It looks down on the city of Manisa, the modern name for Tantalis. The waters that gush from this rock will flow for ever in their grief.
Apollo and Marsyas: Puffed Cheeks
Mortal humans were not the only beings capable of exhibiting excessive pride. The goddess Athena’s injured self-regard led, indirectly, to the downfall of a conceited creature called MARSYAS.
It all began when Athena proudly invented a new musical instrument which she named the aulos. It was a double-reeded pipe of what we would call the woodwind family, not unlike the modern oboe or cor anglais.fn4 There was one problem with this splendid instrument: whenever Athena played it – gorgeous as the music that emerged undoubtedly was – it elicited from her fellow Olympians nothing but roars of laughter. There was no way for Athena to get a good sound from it without blowing so hard that her cheeks bulged. To see this goddess, the very personification of dignity, going all pink and swelling up like a bullfrog was more than her disrespectful family could take without howling out loud. Wise as Athena was, and free (for the most part) of affectation and conceit, she was not entirely without vanity and could not bear to be mocked. After three attempts to win the gods over with the mellifluous sounds of her new instrument, she cursed it and cast it down from Olympus.