Before the boulder, Sisyphus was a Thessalian prince, son of King Aeolus, who founded Ephyra, later Corinth, built it into a trade and navigation hub, and established the Isthmian Games. This episode reconstructs that earlier life, including his habit of murdering guests in violation of xenia, the sacred guest-host law protected by Zeus, and his feud with his brother Salmoneus, which led him to seduce his niece Tyro after the Oracle of Delphi said her children would kill their grandfather.

The story then follows his two great cheats: trading Zeus's secret abduction of Aegina to the river god Asopus for an eternal spring on the Corinthian acropolis, ambushing and chaining Thanatos so that no one on Earth could die until a bored Ares intervened, and ordering his wife Merope to leave his body unburied so he could talk Persephone into a tempora ...