As a punishment for the shrewdness of the man who dared challenge the Gods, Zeus condemned Sisyphus to push a giant stone from the foot of a mountain to its peak. Every time that Sisyphus was about to reach the peak, the stone rolled back downhill to the foot of the mountain and so Sisyphus was forced to restart his task over and over again for as long as he lived (eternally).
The myth of Sisyphus has given birth to the expression “Sisyphean work”, which indicates vain work, i.e. all work that imply a great fatigue but with scarce results, practically no results.
Let us try to reason around this myth: the way which it is normally told emphasizes the difficulty and the toil of Sisyphus work. The stone is described as enormous and he is barely capable of pushing it uphill subjecting his body to enormous work and probably – which we shall see later – to an even worse mental stress.
The first time one reads the drama
of poor Sisyphus it emphasises the
difficulty of the task, but if you
examine the true tragedy, it is not
about the hardness of the task
itself.
Let us suppose that the task
assigned by Zeus (merciful) both
to transport an optionally big
stone (so small that it could be
easily transported in a pocket)
and arrive with it on top of the
