To win back someone the grave has already taken, a mortal turns and lays hands on Death itself. The one witness wired to served text for this wrestling with death is the Greek mythographer Apollodorus, whose The Library (a Greek mythography of the 1st–2nd century CE) sets two figures under the address. The first is Alcestis. The Fates had granted that her husband Admetus might be "released from death" if another would "choose voluntarily to die for him"; when his own parents refused, "Alcestis died in his stead". Yet the tomb does not keep her: the Maiden — whom the apparatus glosses as Persephone, queen of the dead — "sent her up again", or, as others told it, "Hercules fought with Hades" and hauled her back into the light.

The second figure is Sisyphus of Corinth, the cunning knave who cheated the grave outright. In a note, James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish anthropologist who translated and annotated this Apollodorus, records that Sisyphus "laid Death himself by the heels" (Frazer's note), "so that nobody died till Ares released Death" (Frazer's note) and set the world dying again. His cunning is repaid in the underworld, where the served text leaves him forever "rolling a stone with his hands and head" toward a summit it never crests: push as he will, "it rebounds backward".

Only this Greek witness is wired to served text; the record's Indian authority and its comparative entries wait unread. Both stories hand a mortal the impossible grip — a hand on Death, a heel-hold on the grave — and both, in the end, let the ledger balance: Alcestis rises but the underworld keeps its due, Sisyphus binds Death but pays forever at his stone. When a story lets a mortal overpower Death, is it truly a victory over the grave, or only a longer, costlier bargain struck with it?