Kurt Lampe
In one of his journals Camus has jotted down, “The world in which I feel most at ease: Greek myth” (2010a, 249). At no point, however, does he offer a clear explanation of what constitutes a “Greek myth” or how it should be interpreted.1 Regarding the former we can say that he primarily has in mind the traditional stories of heroes and gods passed down by ancient Greek and Roman authors, although he often treats newer fictional and historical narratives in more or less the same way. Regarding the latter, statements are scattered throughout his works. For example, in “Prometheus in the Underworld” he says, “If one man in the world answers their call, [myths] give us their strength in all its fullness. We must preserve this myth, and ensure that its slumber is not mortal so that its resurrection is possible” (1978, 141; cf. 2010b, 80). This seems to imply that myths – like the sleeping heroes they sometimes represent – have a certain fixity of form and meaning, which each generation “awakens.” On the other hand, in The Myth of Sisyphus, he writes, “Nothing is said about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them” (1991,120). This appears to acknowledge that, notwithstanding their trans‐historical stability, myths always present opportunities for imaginative engagement. Only by supplementing their meanings can we “breathe life into them.”
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how Camus gives meaning to just one myth, that of Sisyphus. In the following section I discuss how Camus’ beliefs about the human condition determine his parsing and interpretation of the myth’s elements. His handling of Sisyphus has given rise to charges of both philosophical obtuseness and “unmythical” and “ahistorical” allegorizing.2 In order to evaluate both criticisms in the subsequent two sections I show that the matrix of meaning Camus constructs around Sisyphus evolves through critical interaction with classical texts and their previous scholarly, philosophical, and poetic reception. It is thus more complex than some analytical critics realize, and far from a crude allegory of supposedly eternal truths.
The Myth of Sisyphus concludes with a section also entitled “The Myth of Sisyphus,” of which the first third concerns Sisyphus before his legendary punishment (1991, 119–120). As Faucon and Archambault have documented, the first paragraph follows P. Commelin’s Nouvelle mythologie grecque et romaine extremely closely. The second paragraph is equally indebted to an article in P. Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siècle.3 First Camus sketches Sisyphus’ character: he was the “wisest and most prudent of men,” but also a criminal (1991, 119). Next he summarizes the reasons for Sisyphus’ punishment. He stole and shared the gods’ secrets. He chained Death himself, causing havoc until Pluto sent Mars to rescue him. Finally, after dying he tricked Pluto into releasing him “temporarily” in order to chastise his wife for not burying him. He then refused to return to the underworld.
Camus concludes the overview of Sisyphus’ adventures with a pointed comment:
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.
(Camus 1991, 120)
This is where Camus’ imaginative re‐interpretation really begins. The reader is not only reminded that she should be looking for “the absurd” in this story, she is provided with a set of specific heuristic tools: “hatred of death,” “scorn of the gods,” and “passion for life” are all symptoms of Sisyphus’ absurd sensitivity.
I will begin by focusing on hatred of death and scorn of the gods, leaving passion for life for later. Early in The Myth of Sisyphus Camus sketches some of the experiences that make up the absurd. For example, he imagines the moment when a young man, hitherto straining toward his goals in the future, suddenly realizes “that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to the end” (1991, 13). The epiphany that death is the end toward which his aspirations convey him raises a shiver, which Camus calls “the revolt of the flesh” (1991, 14). This is one manifestation of the absurd. Another is the encounter with bodily mortality, “this inert body on which a slap makes no mark” (1991, 15). A third is the way in which an agent’s awareness of her future annihilation saps her freedom to posit goals and make decisions (1991, 57). Camus does not explain this problem clearly, but we can clarify it with reference to the foregoing: if her endeavors as a whole converge on her non‐being, or on the dumb carnality of her lifeless corpse, then they are somehow drained of efficacy.4 In these ways the experience of mortality destabilizes human values and goals.
The foregoing phenomenology of mortality dovetails with Camus’ diagnosis of the malaise of human reasoning (1991, 16–20).5 He explains that people seek clarity and familiarity in their interactions with the world, yet on rigorous investigation, find that nothing in the world is fully clear or familiar. Absolute truth and ultimate meaning are elusive. “The world itself is not absurd,” he stipulates. “But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational [sic] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart” (1991, 21). The feeling of death’s absurdity and the malaise of reason are thus two parts of the same existential estrangement.
Hatred of death can certainly arise at this level. For example, the starting point for Caligula’s journey into absurdity is the realization that “Men die; and they are not happy” (2006a, 40). He is outraged by the unintelligibility of suffering and mortality. But Sisyphus, like Caligula, becomes an absurd hero by lucidly acknowledging the implosion of value and sterilization of hope. Such heroes perceive that, since values are illusory, quantity of experience is more important than quality (1991, 60–92).6 That is why Camus “sees no contradiction” in the tradition that Sisyphus, the wisest of mortals, was also a “highwayman.” There exists no firm evaluative distinction between brigandage and any other realm of experience. This brings us to the second reason that death is hateful, as a privation of some quantity of experience (1991, 63).
We are now in a position to explain how Camus infers Sisyphus’ hatred of death. Like Caligula, Sisyphus both understands how mortality makes human life absurd and refuses to resign himself to it. Repudiating the absurd, he hates the facticity of dying; acknowledging the absurd, he hates the privation of experience. In a futile display of defiance, Caligula demands the moon and goes on a killing spree; his dying words are “I’m still alive!” (2006a, 104). Sisyphus imprisons Death himself. But neither can overcome his condition: Caligula’s maniacal violence and impossible demands conclude with his assassination, and Sisyphus is dragged back to the underworld.7
Let us now turn to Sisyphus’ scorn for the gods. One of Camus’ epigrammatic formulations is that “the absurd is sin without god” (1991, 40). Wanting to understand the world and being dissatisfied with it are both forms of sin: one places human reason above divine revelation, the other implies criticism of the Creator (1991, 40, 49). Thus, the absurd hero sins against gods whose very existence, paradoxically, he considers unknowable (1991, 51). From this perspective Sisyphus’ “levity in regard to the gods” (1991, 119) can be interpreted as the loosest of allegories. The first meaning of Sisyphus’ connivance against Zeus and disobedience of Pluto would simply be that he “sinfully” trusts his own reasoning and follows his own impulses, disregarding any supposedly transcendental sources of truth or morality.
But this does not fully explain either the emotional valence or the cognitive structure of “scorn,” which involves a negative judgment about its object. Although the French mépris has broader connotations than English “scorn,” ranging from “disregard” to “disdain,”8 we should recall that Camus groups it with hatred of death and love of life as a “passion.” This fits better with disdain than disregard. We should also observe that his account of Sisyphus’ punishment ends with the same word:
Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to crown his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn (mépris).
(Camus 1991, 121)
The emphasis on Sisyphus’ rebellion and his personal relationship with his punishers encourage us to read mépris as an impassioned response rather than as magnanimous detachment. Sisyphus’ mépris for the gods, like his mépris for the punishment they assign him, shares with his hatred of Death a vehement hostility toward its object.
Sisyphus’ scorn has attracted much critical commentary. In one of the earliest Anglo‐American philosophical responses to Camus, Nagel writes:
We can salvage our dignity, he appears to believe, by shaking a fist at the world which is deaf to our pleas, and continuing to live in spite of it. This will not make our lives un‐absurd, but it will lend them a certain nobility.
This seems to me romantic and slightly self‐pitying.
(Nagel 1979, 22)9
Solomon and Sherman develop this criticism more sympathetically, suggesting that Camus, who was captivated by Nietzsche, nevertheless falls into what Nietzsche calls “the shadow of god.”10 In other words, what Camus calls the universal longing for absolute values is actually the feeling of loss expressed by the madman of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science:
“I’m looking for God! I’m looking for God!…. We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. How did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”
(Nietzsche 2001, 125)
Compare the final lament of Camus’ Caligula:
“If I’d had the moon, if love were enough, all might have been quite different. But where could I quench this thirst? What human heart, what god, would have for me the depth of a great lake?”
(Camus 2006a, 103)
Camus’ absurd heroes cannot accept the absence of God’s abyssal profundity and horizon‐setting commandments and prohibitions. According to this interpretation the origin of Sisyphus’ scorn is Camus’ own resentment toward a God who has withdrawn His orienting presence.
But resentment toward “God’s empty throne” does not exhaust the motivation for Sisyphus’ scorn.11 We could also take it as an angry rejection of the rules attributed to gods by mortals. In other words, like his criminality Sisyphus’ impiety could represent revolt against the supposedly transcendental truths of human conventions and institutions. The gap between the superficial and the latent meanings of Sisyphus’ story, which we must fill during the process of interpretation, leaves his scorn over‐determined. In order to get a clearer perspective on several possibilities opened up by “hatred of death” and “scorn of the gods,” and to see how Camus acknowledges the historicity of this complex, it will be useful to compare what he says about “Greek” rebellion nine years later in The Rebel.12
Part II of The Rebel begins with a prehistory of “metaphysical rebellion” in Greek literature (Camus 2008, 83–87), which is inexplicably missing from Bower’s translation. In it Camus distills the product of his extended reflections on Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Sophocles’ Theban plays, Homer’s Achilles, Plato’s Callicles, and Epicurus and Lucretius. Here I will focus on his treatment of the Epicureans, which is the most fully developed, though previous scholars have scarcely addressed it.13
Camus defines metaphysical rebellion as “the justified claim of a desire for unity against the suffering of life and death – in that it protests against the incompleteness of human life, expressed by death, and its dispersion, expressed by evil” (2000, 30). The “protest against the incompleteness of human life” clearly resonates with Sisyphus’ hatred of death. Less obviously, the “protest against evil” permits us to interpret Sisyphus’ scorn for the gods as a “justified claim against” the cause of “the suffering of life.” Compare Rieux in The Plague, whose patient endurance of innumerable meaningless deaths finally snaps: “[T]here are times in this town,” he explains afterward, “when I can only feel outrage and revolt” (Camus 2001, 169). The Jesuit Paneloux responds with a sermon concluding, “We must accept what is outrageous, because we have to choose to hate God or to love him. And who would choose hatred of God?” (Camus 2001, 176) Interpreting The Myth of Sisyphus retrospectively, we might say that “hatred of gods” as agents of unjustified suffering is precisely what Sisyphus chooses.
In The Rebel, however, Camus stipulates that metaphysical rebellion requires monotheism (2008, 84–85); because the Greeks acknowledge no single cause for the human condition, this sort of revolt is essentially foreign to them. Even Aeschylus’ Prometheus “does not set himself against the whole of creation, but against Zeus, who is never more than one of the gods” (2008, 83; cf. 2010a: 128). The principal unifying agency in Greek thought is “nature,” and “rebelling against nature amounts to rebelling against oneself. It’s banging your head against a wall” (2008, 83). Hence Achilles, Oedipus, Antigone, and Callicles never contemplate “total condemnation” of the world (2008, 84). Only with Epicurus and Lucretius, whom Camus misleadingly groups as “the final moments of ancient thought” (2008, 85), do we approach metaphysical rebellion.14
The starting point for Camus’ analysis is Epicurus’ “dreadful sadness” (2008, 85). This approach to Epicurus once again owes something to Camus’ fascination with Nietzsche, who writes in The Gay Science:
Epicurus … Only someone who is continually suffering could invent such happiness – the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has grown still and which now cannot get enough of seeing the surface and this colourful, tender, quivering skin of the sea: never before has voluptuousness been so modest.
(Nietzsche 2001, 45)15
Yet Camus has also read (at least) Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus, Principal Sayings, and Vatican Sayings, quotations from which anchor his interpretation.16 The thematic centerpiece of this interpretation is Vatican Saying 31: “One can secure oneself against all sorts of things, but when it comes to death, we are all like inhabitants of a demolished citadel” (2008, 85). Camus believes that “anxious fear of death” is the root of Epicurus’ sadness. In order to escape it Epicurus “exhausts himself raising walls around man, refortifying the citadel” (2008, 86). One part of this fortifying self‐isolation involves identifying with the atoms, the basic elements of Epicurean physics. Camus interprets this as ontological petrification: “Stone: that’s Being” (2008, 85). This petrification extends into Epicurus’ ethical goal, which is the removal of pain and distress. “It’s the happiness of stones,” Camus comments (2008, 85). The other part of this self‐isolation is “killing” people’s “expectation of salvation,” which otherwise “pulls them from the silence of the citadel” (2008, 85).17 This mortification of hope is accomplished by attributing “vertiginous remoteness” to the gods, who neither care about nor act upon the world. Combined with ontological and ethical petrification, it enables Epicurus’ paean of triumph: “When the inevitable hour of departure sounds, our scorn for those who vainly protest against existence will ring out with this fine song: ‘Ah, how worthily we have lived!’” (2008, 86).
It is clear from this interpretive summary that Camus’ Epicurus is not a metaphysical rebel. His repressed fear and bitterness lead to ratiocinative defense mechanisms, not open condemnation of the universe and its makers. His physics and ethics extinguish desire for joy the world cannot provide, while hardening the body against suffering; and his theology eliminates hope. But Camus believes that the repressed returns in Lucretius, who “trembles […] at the injustice done to man” (2008, 87). He cites Lucretius’ depiction of Iphigenia’s slaughter in the name of religion (DRN 1.84–101), and his mention of “divine” lightning that “bypasses the guilty and will deprive the innocent of life through an unmerited punishment” (DRN 5.1103–1104). Lucretius’ indignation breaks Epicurus’ compromise formation, leading this Roman Epicurean not only to “deny the unworthy and criminal gods” (2008, 87) but to put Epicurus in their place: “Thus religion in its turn is overthrown and trampled underfoot, victory raises us to the heavens” (DRN 1.78–79). Camus hints that this is the beginning of ideological terror, in which the “scorn” for the unenlightened attributed to Epicurus (in a “quotation” invented by Camus18) somehow evolves into Lucretius’ vision, at the conclusion of book 6, of “divine sanctuaries bursting with corpses” (2008, 87). It thus looks forward to part III of The Rebel, which climaxes with a critique of fascist and especially Soviet ideologies and the atrocities to which they lead.19
This interpretation not only grows out of Camus’ reading of (Nietzsche’s reading of) Epicurus, it also develops the post‐Enlightenment motif of Lucretius’ tortured psyche.20 For example, Camus may have been familiar with Constant Martha’s Le poëme de Lucrèce, which argues at length that Lucretius’ “sadness,” “bitterness” and “bitter reflections,” “spiritual affliction,” “profound emotion,” and “irascibility” are all the result of the encounter of his poetic sensitivity with Epicurus’ “unjust and hard” doctrines.21 More importantly for us, Camus’ appropriation of this interpretive tradition generates a more nuanced understanding of how the impulses underlying Sisyphus’ hate‐scorn complex manifest themselves. His reading of Epicurus and Lucretius concretizes the polysemy of Sisyphus’ fabulous story in two historically particular forms, each with its own psychology and latent political ideology. Classical texts thus help Camus to bridge the gap between the dehistoricized, individual problematic of The Myth of Sisyphus and the historicized politics of The Rebel.
Although it is now very familiar, Camus intends the final sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus to be shocking: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (1991, 123). After all, how can the victim of eternal torment be happy? Building on his interpretation of Camusian scorn, Solomon speaks of Sisyphus’ “‘sour grapes’ self‐satisfaction that tries to pass as ‘happiness,’ the spiteful joy of ‘negating the gods,’ that desperate last‐ditch strategy of accepting and even celebrating a hopeless and even futile life.”22 There is some justice in Solomon’s accusation. Camus emphasizes Sisyphus’ reflection on the futility of his labor during his descent from the mountain. The decision to continue despite the lucidity of his reflection makes him “superior to his fate”; as we have already read, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (Camus 1991, 121). This suggests that Sisyphus’ courageous ability and pugnacious desire to face the truth help to make him happy. But this happiness is not solely grounded in Camus’ celebration of “puckish despair.”23 We can broaden our understanding of the essay’s ending by asking why it begins with an epigraph from Pindar’s Pythian 3.61–62: “O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible” (1991, 2).24
If we take this quotation to anticipate Sisyphus’ scornful attitude toward human and divine laws, we may suspect Camus of ignoring its context. Pindar’s theology and politics are deeply conservative.25 The occasion and meaning of Pythian 3 are debated by scholars,26 but one of its messages is that human beings, acknowledging their subordination to the gods, must moderate their thoughts and hopes (3.59–60). Thus, Coronis, pregnant with Apollo’s child, is killed for sleeping with a mortal man (Camus 1991, 5–37); her son Asclepius, gifted with healing powers, is incinerated for resurrecting the dead (Camus 1991, 38–58); and even the divine marriages of Cadmus and Peleus are followed by the suffering of their children (1991, 86–103). In each case humans who have the good fortune to mingle with the gods are reminded of their ethical and ontological subordination. This is hardly a lesson Camus’ Sisyphus would deign to learn.
But perhaps we are focusing on the wrong facet of Pindar’s message. Pindar also intends to celebrate his patron Hiero, “Who rules as king of Syracuse,/kind to strangers, not begrudging to good men, a wondrous father to strangers” (1991, 70–71). In other words, he both subtly advises Hiero to practice moderation in his prosperity and praises him for already doing so. Simultaneously he elevates and cautions himself in a similar manner (1991, 107–111).
This message of simultaneous self‐assertion and self‐limitation is one Camus can eagerly embrace. In fact, the penultimate section of The Rebel is entitled “Moderation and Excess” (2000, 258–265), and takes the Greek Nemesis as its figurehead (2000, 260).27 In The Rebel Nemesis represents the disastrous consequences of erecting transcendental principles on the foundation of metaphysical rebellion. In other words, justified protest against unintelligible suffering should not lead to fantasies about a world free from evil. That would introduce intelligibility at the cost of justifying murder. A utopian future justifies any means whatsoever of its actualization; Lucretius’ nightmare becomes manmade reality. It would then be humans themselves, not the gods, who inflicted their own punishment.
But in The Myth of Sisyphus the accent is on moderation, not the penalties for excess. Far from positing universal values, Sisyphus simply resolves to find good and evil within his absurd situation:
His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory.
(1991, 123)
Sisyphus’ “victory” represents his forswearing of divinely guaranteed values. He accepts the burden of living in divine “silence,” struggling to hear the “unconscious, secret calls” of a merely human world. But there is also something beautiful in the “myriad wondering little voices of the earth.” On the one hand this recalls Camus’ early notebooks, where the condition for ecstatic sensitivity to “the world of flesh and light” is the disciplined silence of the mind’s hopes and fears (2010b, esp. 9, 17, 43, 55, 66–67, 105, 130, 173, and so on).28 On the other, Sisyphus’ rock represents immanent purpose: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (1991, 123). This anticipates Rieux’s Sisyphean struggle against the illness in The Plague, which he says is simply “his job” (2001, 93–100). Sisyphus’ happiness is thus stretched between the joy of evanescent moments and the purposefulness of tasks that lack ultimate justification. This is a consciously limited form of happiness, scrupulously pruned of superhuman hopes, and in this respect harmonizes with Pindar’s sentiment.
In fact, the significance of this epigraph can be pursued even further, since Camus knows it is also the epigraph to Paul Valéry’s “The Graveyard by the Sea” (1920). Through the dazzling interplay of symbols in this poem – the graveyard and its dead, the ocean and its waves, the sun and its light – Valéry explores his desire for knowledge, unity, eternity, and ultimately death.29 His reverie climaxes with an address to Zeno:
Zeno, Zeno, the cruel Elean Zeno!
You’ve truly fixed me with that feathered arrow,
Which quivers as it flies and never moves!
The sound begets me and the arrow kills!
Ah sun! … What a tortoise shadow for the soul,
Achilles motionless in his giant stride!
(1971, 121–126)
Here Valéry invokes two Zenonean paradoxes, both of which are designed to show that motion is impossible: an arrow in flight cannot progress, and Achilles can never overtake a tortoise (Ar. Ph. 6.9.239b5–18 with Simpl. in Ph. 1014.5). The goal of these paradoxes is usually understood to be confirmation of Parmenides’ ontological monism. The allure of this monism “kills” Valéry, whose swift soul (Achilles) struggles in vain to overtake unmoving Being (the tortoise).30 But the last three stanzas reject this mortifying nostalgia, beginning with the very next line: “No, no! Up! and away into the next era!” (Valéry 1971, 127) Valéry propels himself into the succession of temporality, embracing a Dionysian vision of the sea that previously appeared immobile: “Yes, gigantic sea delirium‐dowered,/… Absolute hydra, drunk with your blue flesh,/Forever biting your own glittering tail” (1971, 132–138). His opening citation of Pindar thus signifies his regretful rejection of unity in preference for sensuality and plurality.
Camus’ thoughts on “The Graveyard by the Sea” can be inferred from an unpublished poem of 1933 (Camus 2006b, 976–978).31 Here a man observes the Mediterranean at morning, midday, evening, and again in the morning.32 The setting is emphatically not a cemetery: “At the graveyards by the sea there is only eternity./There infinity with its funereal spindles grows weary.” With these verses Camus repudiates Valéry’s nostalgia. He writes that the Mediterranean is “made to our measure,/Man and tree unite and in them the universe plays a comedy,/in travesty of the golden number.” In mocking the numerological ideal of the golden number Camus rejects the desire to reduce the world to arithmetic clarity. It is thus not coincidental that he frames both ends of his poem with the “brilliant blue teeth” of the sea, recalling Valéry’s “hydra, drunk with your blue flesh, forever biting your own tail.” Camus’ protagonist observes “yellow, green and red” curtains, “young girls with naked arms hanging out the linen,” and in general the vivid activity of Mediterranean life. Although his Mediterraneans “know their limits” and “wait for death” in its purity, Camus’ emphasis is on the dazzling sensuality of their life.
Camus’ appropriation of Valéry’s epigraph in The Myth of Sisyphus thus builds on his criticism in 1933 of Valéry’s reluctance to abandon unity and purity for temporality and carnality. This in turn amplifies the significance of that epigraph for the understanding of absurd happiness. Far from communicating a message about submission to divine hierarchy, for Camus these verses express the need to abandon the temptations of both popular faith and Valéry’s esoteric mysticism. Later they will also come to signify rejection of political absolutes. This is what Camus intends by giving up “immortal life.” “Exhausting the limits of the possible” means embracing immanent purposes, even though they lack foundations, and enjoying each pleasant moment, even though many moments are almost unbearably painful.
Camus’ highly systematic literary project, which was (absurdly) cut short by his accidental death in 1959, means that the significance of Sisyphus ramifies across his works. Camus writes:
My work will count as many forms as it has stages on the way to an unrewarded perfection. The Stranger is a zero point. Likewise, The Myth of Sisyphus. The Plague is a progress, not from zero toward the infinite, but toward a deeper complexity that remains to be defined.
(2010a: 20. Cf. 1978: 155)
In this short chapter, I have only begun to explore the Greek and Roman texts and their previous interpreters which helped Camus to arrive at the “zero point” of The Myth of Sisyphus. Through The Rebel in particular I have also looked at how the same texts supported his “progress toward a deeper complexity that remains to be defined.” Thus, we can see that, despite his sometimes universalizing and ahistorical attitude, the “world of Greek myth” by which his project was nourished weaves together a colorful and ever‐changing sequence of scholarly, literary, historical, and philosophical influences.
Archambault (1972) is the best starting point for tracing Camus’ indebtedness to ancient Greek sources. Miller (2007, 43–51) situates Camus in a rich tradition of theorizing and portraying “authentic” subjectivity by adapting classical Greek and Roman models; Richardson (2012) does the same for Camus’ deployment of the signifiers “Greece” and “Rome.” On Camus’ philosophy, see especially Sharpe (2015), Sherman (2009), Solomon (2006) and Weyembergh (1998). All of these topics are illuminated in the biography of Zaretsky (2010), as well as in the absolutely superb Aronson (2004) (simply the finest biography I have ever read: simultaneously gripping and intellectually subtle). Finally, the extensive notes in both Gallimard editions of the Oeuvres complètes of course merit consultation.