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Updated: July 5, 2025
Let us leave States and senates to fill the sieve of the Danaides, and roll up the stone of Sisyphus." "My dear friend," said De Montaigne, "you have certainly made the most of an argument, which, if granted, would consign government to fools and knaves, and plunge the communities of mankind into the Slough of Despond. But a very commonplace view of the question might suffice to shake your system.
Translated by H. W. and F. G. Fowler. Menippus was a Cynic philosopher, originally a slave, born in Syria. Sisyphus, whose punishment was to roll a stone up a hill and then see it roll back again, being condemned perpetually to attempt rolling it completely to the top, belonged to a period anterior to Homer, and was the founder of Corinth. Homer describes him as the craftiest of men.
Doubtless many foreigners coming to this country are not much, but the greatest number are soldiers who saw service and fire, and could be of some use at the side of Scott's West Point greenness and presumption. If we are worsted, then the fate of the men of faith in principles will be that of Sisyphus, and the coming generation for half a century will have uphill work.
At one moment I seem to grasp the truth, at another it is far away from me; and, like another Sisyphus, I begin again to climb the hill which I have just rolled down, along with all the mass of my labours." The projector, who had hitherto kept silence, now struck in. "Here we are," he said, "four complainants, brought together by poverty under the roof of this hospital.
Bank-paper issues meanwhile expanded by the billion. The great contest in Germany is to maintain this bank metal reserve, and it is the task of Sisyphus and of herculean proportions. Outside of the United States, Germany has probably little, if any, credit to-day. She must pay in gold for what she buys from without, and from without she must get copper and oil.
This is literally 'beating the air. The ancients imagined tortures particularly trying to nature, that of Sisyphus to wit; everlasting labor embittered by everlasting nihilification. We have made Sisyphism vulgar. Here are fifteen Sisyphi. Only the wise or ancients called this thing infernal torture; our old women call it salutary discipline."
So far his life had been a long series of disappointments. His labours as an explorer had met with no adequate recognition, the Damascus Consulship could be remembered only with bitterness, his numerous books had sold badly. Every stone which for forty years he had rolled up proved to be only a Sisyphus stone.
He presented in his tragedy Sisyphus, the first and great patron of this opinion, and introduced himself as one agreeing with him: Disorder in those days did domineer, And brutal power kept the world in fear.
In her odd disjointed way, too, she took a real interest in politics. Her craving idealist nature mated with a cheery sportsman husband who laughed at her, yet had made her happy was always trying to reconcile the ends of eternal justice with the measures of the Tory party. It was a task of Sisyphus; but she would not let it alone.
Your camp of to-day differs only in non-essentials from that of yesterday, and your camp of to-morrow will probably be almost exactly like to-day's. Only when you reach your objective point do you come to a full realization that you have not been the Sisyphus of the Red Gods. Deuce returning from exploration brought indubitable evidence of porcupines.
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