Sisyphus, as the story goes, was a King who widely extended the
commerce, and largely increased the wealth, of Corinth, but by
avaricious and fraudful ways; for the sin whereof he was sentenced after
death to the unresting labour of rolling up a hill in Tartarus, a huge
unhewn block of stone, which so soon as he gets it to the hill top, for
all his efforts, rolls down again. In classical representation of the
scene he is associated with Tantalus and Ixion; Tantalus, who, presuming
too much on his relations with Zeus, was after death afflicted with an
unquenchable thirst amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes--like
the lakes of "The Thirst of the Antelope" in the marvellous mirages of
Rajputana and Mesopotamia--that ever elude his anguished approaches; and
with Ixion, the meanest and basest of cheats, and most demoniac of
murderers, whose posthumous punishment was in being stretched, and
broken, and bound, in the figure of the svastika, on a wheel which,
self-moved--like the wheels of the vision of Ezekiel--whirls forevermore
round and round the abyss of the nether world. The moral of these
tortures is that we may well and most wisely leave vengeance to "the
high Gods." They will repay!