Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Tyro had swallowed Sisyphus’s charm whole, but she loved her father Salmoneus with a loyalty that overrode any other consideration. The idea of allowing her sons to grow up to kill their grandfather was out of the question. She knew how to defy the oracle’s prophecy.

‘Come child,’ she said to the eldest, ‘look down at the stream. Can you see any little fishes?’

The small boy knelt on the riverbank and looked down. Tyro put a hand to his neck and pushed him under. When he had stopped struggling she did the same to the youngest.

‘Now,’ she said quite calmly to the traumatized maid, ‘this is what you will do …’

Sisyphus and Melops caught plenty of fish that afternoon. Just as the light was fading and they had started to pack up for the day, Tyro’s maidservant appeared before them, bobbing a nervous curtsey.

‘Beg pardon, majesty, but the Queen asks that you might greet the princes. They are by the riverbank, awaiting your majesty. Just behind the willow tree, sire.’

Sisyphus went to the place indicated to find his two sons lying stretched out on the grass, pale and lifeless.

The maid ran for her life and was never heard of again. Tyro, by the time the enraged Sisyphus had reached the palace with drawn sword, was safely on her way to her father’s kingdom of Elis. On her arrival home Salmoneus married her to his brother Cretheus, with whom she was deeply unhappy.

Salmoneus himself, quite as proud and vainglorious as his hated brother, had set himself up in Elis as a kind of god. Claiming to equal Zeus’s power to summon storms, he’d ordered the construction of a brass bridge over which he liked to ride his chariot at breakneck speed, trailing kettles, cauldrons and iron pots to mimic the sound of thunder. Flaming torches would be thrown skywards at the same time to imitate lightning. Such blasphemous impertinence caught the eye of Zeus, who ended the farrago with a real thunderbolt. The king, his chariot, brass bridge, cooking utensils and all were blasted to atoms and the shade of Salmoneus cast down to eternal damnation in the darkest depths of Tartarus.

Sisyphean Tasks

Sisyphus held a great feast to celebrate the death of his preposterous thunder-making brother. The morning after, he was awoken by a deputation of aggrieved lords, landowners and tenant farmers. After he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and cleared his headache with a goblet of unwatered wine he consented to hear what might be the matter.

‘Majesty, someone is stealing our cattle! Each one of us can report a loss. Your own royal herds are depleted too. You are a wise and clever king. Surely you can find out who is responsible?’

Sisyphus dismissed them with a promise to investigate. He had a very good idea that the thief was his neighbour AUTOLYCUS, but how to prove it? Sisyphus was guileful and smart, but Autolycus was a son of Hermes himself, the prince of robbers and rascals, the god who as an infant had rustled Apollo’s cattle. From Hermes, Autolycus had inherited not only this propensity to take cows that didn’t belong to him, but also powers of enchantment that made it very difficult to catch him in the act.fn1 Besides, the cattle that Sisyphus and his neighbours had lost were brown and white and generously horned, while those of Autolycus were black and white and entirely hornless. It was baffling, but Sisyphus was sure that spells taught by Hermes were behind it and that Autolycus was secretly colour-changing stolen cows.

‘Very well,’ he said to himself, ‘we shall see which proves the more powerful, the cheap magic of a trickster god’s bastard or the native wit and intelligence of Sisyphus, founder of Corinth, the cleverest king in the world.’

He commanded that all his and his neighbours’ cattle should have the words ‘AUTOLYCUS STOLE ME’ carved into their hoofs in tiny lettering. Over the next seven nights, as expected, the local herds continued regularly to be depleted. On the eighth day Sisyphus and the leading landowners paid Autolycus a visit.

‘Greetings, my friends!’ their neighbour cried with a cheery wave. ‘To what do I owe the honour of this visit?’

‘We have come to inspect your cattle,’ said Sisyphus.

‘By all means. Are you thinking of breeding black and whites yourself? My pedigree herd is unique in the region, they tell me.’

‘Oh, it’s unique alright,’ returned Sisyphus. ‘Whoever saw hoofs like this?’ He lifted the foreleg of one of the cows.

Autolycus leaned forward, read the words carved into the hoof and gave a cheerful shrug. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Fun while it lasted.’

‘Take them all,’ commanded Sisyphus. As the landowners led the animals away, Sisyphus looked towards Autolycus’s house. ‘I think I’ll help myself to all your cows,’ he said. ‘Every last heifer.’ By which he meant AMPHITHEA, Autolycus’s wife.

Sisyphus was not a good man.fn2

The Eagle