Sisyphus.
Founder of the city of Corinth, Sisyphus was the son of Aeolus of Thessaly and Enarete and the grandfather of Bellerophon. He established the Isthmian games and fortified the acropolis at Corinth. However, he was primarily noted for his cunning.
    When the master thief Autolycus stole his prized cattle, Sisyphus traced them by following the marks he had made on their hooves. He then avenged himself by seducing Autolycus's daughter Anticlea, leading some to suppose that he, rather than Laertes of Ithaca, was the father of Odysseus.
    Having observed Zeus's seduction of the nymph Aegina, Sisyphus reported the story to her father, the river-god Asopus. According to Pherecydes (FRGH 3F119), Zeus punished Sisyphus by sending Thanatos (Death) to claim him. Sisyphus eluded Thanatos once, by imprisoning him in a dungeon from which he was released by Ares, and finally yielded to him only after making his wife, Merope, promise to leave his corpse unburied and to make no offerings for him. In the Underworld, he received permission from Hades to return to earth by saying that he wished to punish Merope for this sacrilege. Sisyphus then lived a long life. When he eventually died, the gods punished him by making him perpetually roll a boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it roll back down as it reached the summit.
    It is worth noting that at Sisyphus' entrance into literature, none of the backstory is articulated. Odysseus reports having seen Sisyphus toiling in the World of the Dead, but keeps silent on the reasons for his punishment. Homer's brilliantly onomatopoetic rhythm and sound masterfully reproduce the dramatic resonance of Sisyphus' burden returning to the plain — αὖτις ἔπειτα πέδονδε κυλίνδετο λᾶας ἀναιδής.(Od. 11.598)
    Treatments of Sisyphus in the fine arts commonly depict him pushing the boulder uphill. He is sometime grouped with Ixion, Tantalus, and Tityus, known collectively as the Four Blasphemers (or Deceivers, Disgracers, Condemned). Albert Camus' 1942 essay, Le mythe de Sisyphe: essai sur l'absurde, spawned many novel treatments of Sisyphus and has thus proved to be a watershed in modern thinking about Sisyphus.