Sisyphus is a figure from Greek mythology, king of Ephyra (Corinth), condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill in Hades for eternity, only to watch it roll back down each time. In ancient sources he is the archetypal trickster who cheated death. In modern thought, Albert Camus's essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) reinterprets him as the symbol of the absurd human condition, concluding that 'one must imagine Sisyphus happy.'
The defining mythological image of futile repetitive labour; through Camus, transformed into the central emblem of existentialist and absurdist philosophy; endures as shorthand for any endless, apparently meaningless struggle.
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