 According to the solar theory, King Sisyphus is the disk of the sun that rises every day in the east and then sinks into the west.Other scholars regard him as a personification of waves rising and falling, or of the treacherous sea.The 1st-century BC Epicurean philosopher Lucretius interprets the myth of Sisyphus as personifying politicians aspiring for political office who are constantly defeated, with the quest for power, in itself an "empty thing", being likened to rolling the boulder up the hill.