Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942:
"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to
fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Yannis Dragasakis, Greek Deputy Prime Minister & Yanis
Varoufakis, Greek Finance Minister & Euclid Tsakalotos, deputy minister for
international economic relations in
FT, UK, March 18 2015:
"The country is in a position like that of Sisyphus — a
man condemned to roll a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll down
again...We risk condemning an entire generation to a future without hope. To
avoid that, what we ask from our euro-zone partners is to treat Greece as an
equal and help us escape from this Sisyphean trap."
As a punishment for for chronic deceitfulness, King Sisyphus is made to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Before he can reach the top, however, the massive stone always rolls back down, forcing him to begin again.
Sisyphus is married to Atlas’s daughter Merope. It is said that Merope is the faintest of the stars because she is the only of the Pleiades to have married a mortal.
L'Etoile Perdue (The Lost Star), 1884
Artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)
Artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)
courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
After reading Greek ministers' comments above, the following cartoon looked even funnier... Merope, the wife, is blocking the progress of Sisyphus!
Is the rest of EU behaving like Merope for Greece?
Artist: Shannon Wheeler, The New Yorker, November 2013