In Greek mythology Sisyphus was a clever, greedy and ruthless king who decided to deceive death itself. He was said to be the first king to establish trade and to discover navigation, allowing human beings to cross the seas toward distant lands.

When he began manipulating nature, Zeus ordered Death to chain him in the depths of Tartarus. On his journey to the underworld, Sisyphus tricked Thanatos, the god of peaceful and non-violent death, into showing him how the chains worked. In this way he found an opportunity to deceive Thanatos and chain him in Tartarus in his own place.

Sisyphus returned to the earth, and after that no one died a natural death, not even those who were very old and suffering from illness. Eventually the gods threatened Sisyphus that they would fill his life with pain and calamity unless he released Death from his chains, and he was forced to do so. Before his own death, however, he instructed his wife to cast his naked body into a river that flowed toward the lands of Persephone.

He then deceived Persephone, wife of the god of the underworld and bringer of spring, telling her that his naked condition was evidence of Hades’ disrespect toward her. Sisyphus persuaded Persephone to send him back to the world of the living.

Finally, after his second return to the world of the living, Zeus, god of the gods, ordered that as punishment for his deceit and arrogance Sisyphus would be condemned forever to push a great stone to the top of a hill every day, only for the stone to roll back down at the end of each day. This would remain his unending, eternal punishment.

Although illustration is not my profession, the image I see in the struggle of modern humanity against coronavirus is nothing other than a renewed image of the story of Sisyphus—or Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus—with the difference that even within this painful futility one may perhaps find meaning. This is why I decided to draw the image you see.

Another myth says that in the whole history of the world there is only one moment when Sisyphus stops pushing the stone and the stone itself does not roll downward. It is the moment when Sisyphus listens to the music of Orpheus, who journeys to the underworld to recover his love—or, in another sense, his own soul. It is the only moment when the futile and monotonous turning of the world comes to a halt.

Aydin Areta