Before the boulder, Sisyphus was a Thessalian prince, son of King Aeolus, who founded Ephyra, later Corinth, built it into a trade and navigation hub, and established the Isthmian Games. This episode reconstructs that earlier life, including his habit of murdering guests in violation of xenia, the sacred guest-host law protected by Zeus, and his feud with his brother Salmoneus, which led him to seduce his niece Tyro after the Oracle of Delphi said her children would kill their grandfather.

The story then follows his two great cheats: trading Zeus’s secret abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus for an eternal spring on the Corinthian acropolis, ambushing and chaining Thanatos so that no one on Earth could die until a bored Ares intervened, and ordering his wife Merope to leave his body unburied so he could talk Persephone into a temporary release he never honored. The hosts examine Merope’s possible role as accomplice, the rumor that Sisyphus fathered Odysseus, Hades’ tailored punishment of the slipping stone, and how Lucretius, Albert Camus and behavioral research on the Sisyphean condition have reinterpreted it.

• Competing origins of the Isthmian Games from Pausanias and Pindar
• Why bloodless war, not human suffering, finally moved a god to free Death
• How Sisyphus weaponized the underworld’s own burial rules against Persephone
• Camus’s claim that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, and the pushback from psychology
• Whether a punishment that keeps his name alive counts as a form of kleos