Believing the prophecy, he raped and impregnated Tyro. Sisyphus asked the Oracle at Delphi how he could visit revenge upon his brother and was given a prophecy that if he bore children with Salmoneus’ daughter Tyro (his niece!) that they would grow up to murder their father. He had been born into the royal family of Thessaly but his brother, Salmoneus, took the throne. No one knows if Anticleia’s husband or Sisyphus was his real father but you have to wonder where Odysseus’ intelligence came from! Prophecy, rape, and murder Afterward, Anticleia married and gave birth to Odysseus, another Greek famous for cleverness. Determined to seek revenge, he seduced Autolycus’ daughter, Anticleia. Sisyphus the seducerĬatching the thief red-handed would be enough for most people but Sisyphus was enraged. Sisyphus, realizing his herd was steadily shrinking while Autolycus’ was growing, secretly marked the inside of his herd’s hooves with the words “Stolen by Autolycus.” Despite Autolycus’ cattle looking nothing like the ones stolen from Sisyphus, when he lifted the hoof of a stolen cow and revealed the words written there the theft was exposed. While everyone knew Autolycus was a horse thief, no one had been able to prove it because he was able to change the appearance of animals: Stolen white cattle became brown, uniformly colored cattle became spotted, and horned cattle lost their horns. Sisyphus first revealed his character to the world when a notorious horse thief, Autolycus, began stealing cattle from Sisyphus’ herd.

Sisyphus was famed for his cleverness, leading Homer to describe him in the Iliad as “the most cunning of men.” Unfortunately for Sisyphus, he was also a selfish and evil person who deserved everything he got. According to Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the founder and King of Corinth, a city in south-central Greece. I’ll get to the leadership lesson in a moment, but first let me tell you a story.

The story of sisyphus