II—“Sisyphus,—his Stone”
Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced after death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus, a huge unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill top, for all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation of the scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus, who, presuming too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death afflicted with an unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes—like the lakes of “The Thirst of the Antelope” in the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia—that ever elude his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the svastika, on a wheel which, self-moved—like the wheels of the vision of Ezekiel—whirls for evermore round and round the abyss of the nether world. The moral of these tortures is that we may well and most wisely leave vengeance to “the high Gods.” They will repay!
GEORGE BIRDWOOD
SISYPHUS