A Divine Punishment of Endless Toil
The gods threatened Sisyphus with dire punishments if he did not free the god of death, so he reluctantly did. However, Sisyphus had one more trick up his sleeve to cheat Thanatos. He instructed his wife not to bury him or perform any of the sacred death rituals when he passed away, and to just throw his corpse out. She obeyed, and when Sisyphus arrived at the underworld, he begged Thanatos to allow him to return to earth to punish his wife for her “impiety”. Death agreed, but once Sisyphus was back on earth, he went on the lam. After he tricked death to let him return to the world of the living, Sisyphus went on to live to a ripe old age, before he died for a second time. That was when he discovered that he had been too clever by half, and too smart for his own good.
The gods were ticked off because Sisyphus had made them look like fools. They also took offense at his self-aggrandizement, deceitfulness, and the hubris that led him to believe that he was smarter than Zeus. So the Olympians decided to make an example out of Sisyphus. The gods thought, with some reason, that few punishments are more terrible than an eternity of futile and hopeless labor. So they condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a huge boulder up a steep hill. Soon as he got his boulder to the top of the hill, it would roll down the other side, and he would have to go back down and collect his boulder to push it up the hill again.
