Page:Homer. The Odyssey (IA homerodyssey00collrich).pdf/94

had been admitted as a guest to the banquet of the immortals, and had stolen their nectar and ambrosia to give to his fellow-men. Sisyphus had been, it is true, a notorious robber on earth, but the penalty assigned him was for the higher crime of betraying an amour of Jupiter's which had come to his knowledge. The stone of Sisyphus has been commonly taken as an illustration of labour spent in vain; but a modern English poet has found in it a beautiful illustration of the indestructibility of hope. In one of Lord Lytton's 'Tales of Miletus,' when Orpheus visits the Shades in search of his lost wife—

"He heard, tho' in the midst of Erebus,
Song sweet as his Muse-mother made his own;
It broke forth from a solitary ghost,
Who, up a vaporous hill,

"Heaved a huge stone that came rebounding back,
And still the ghost upheaved it and still sang.
In the brief pause from toil while towards the height
Reluctant rolled the stone,

"The Thracian asked in wonder, 'Who art thou,
Voiced like Heaven's lark amidst the night of Hell?'
'My name on earth was Sisyphus,' replied
The phantom. 'In the Shades

"I keep mine earthly wit; I have duped the Three.^[1]
They gave me work for torture; work is joy.
Slaves work in chains, and to the clank they sing.'
Said Orpheus, 'Slaves still hope!'

"'And could I strain to heave up the huge stone
Did I not hope that it would reach the height?
There penance ends, and dawn Elysian fields.'
'But if it never reach?'

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1. The judges of the Dead—Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Æacus.