The Sisyphus fragment is a fragment of verse, preserved in the works of Sextus Empiricus and thought to have been composed in the 5th-century BC by a Greek playwright, either Critias or Euripides, and which is thought to contain an atheistic argument.
Text
The Greek text is conserved in Sextus Empiricus 9.54 Several English versions exist. That by R. G. Bury runs:-
Authorship
The authorship of the fragment, which survives in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, is vigorously debated. Modern classical scholarship accepted the attribution to Critias on the basis of an hypothesis first advanced by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in 1875, and thereafter Hermann Diels, Johann August Nauck, and Bruno Snell, endorsed this ascription for which there is but one source in antiquity. In 1979, Albrecht Dihle in a major paper challenged this ascription and assigned the work to Euripides, arguing that the fragment comes from the latter's satyr play of this name, produced in 415 BCE. Dihle's gained wide acceptance, being endorsed by several modern scholars, among them Charles Kahn, Ruth Scodel, Martin Ostwald, Jan Bremmer and Harvey Yunis. Not all have been persuaded however. and, at that time, Walter Burkert, the doyen of scholars of Greek religion for one, remained skeptical. One source in antiquity ascribed the passage to Critias, one of the thirty oligarchs who ruled Athens in the immediate aftermath of the city-state's defeat in the Peloponesian War: two attribute it, or lines in it, to Euripides. Sextus Empiricus assigned these verses to Critias without however indicating which of his works. Both the Stoic logician Chrysippus and the doxographerAëtius cited Euripides as the author, specifying that it was taken from that author's lost play Sisyphus. In modern times, Wilamowitz came down strongly for the view that it was written by Critias, a disciple of Socrates, and dated it, as forming the coda of a tetralogy, following 3 tragedies by Critias -Peirithous, Rhadumunthus and Tennes -, which he argued was written sometime after his return from exile in 411. The view that it was written by Euripides frequently identifies it as belonging to the Sisyphus, the satyr play capping his 415 trilogy: Alexandros, Palamedes and The Trojan Women, though Jan N. Bremmer suggests another lost play by Euripides, his Autolykos would be a more attractive candidate as the original source. A major issue in discussing to authorship of the passage hinges round the question as to whether the speaker's views reflect those of an historic atheist, or whether the lines are simply a dramatic mise en scène of an atheistic outlook, and therefore not one entertained by its author. Dihle argued that there was no evidence in the surviving fragments of Kritias that he was an atheist, except for the testimony of Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch, a point Burkert challenged in the revised English version of his book on Greek Religion by citing the testimony of a fragment of Epicurus from Bk.11 of his work On Nature.
Style
The fragment is composed of 42 iambic trimeters. The topic concerns the mythical figure of Sisyphus. Style plays an important function in the authorship question: if we take it as expressing the view of the sophist Critias, the cynical deconstruction of religion would appear to harmonize perfectly with the character of that historical person, -'that brilliant but sinister figure in the politics and letters of the end of the fifth century' - who gained a reputation for ruthless unscrupulousness. But were it to pertain to the genre of the satyr play, then we would not expect a straightforward exposition of a theory but rather a parody of it, a tone lacking in the surviving fragment.
