11. The Divine Vengeance Visited Upon Sisyphus
After he tricked death to let him return to the world of the living, King Sisyphus went on to live to a ripe old age, before he died for a second time. That was when Sisyphus discovered he had been too clever by half, and too smart for his own good. The gods were ticked off at him because he had shown them up and 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 visited terrible vengeance upon Sisyphus so as to make an example of him. 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 Sisyphus 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.
