Tantalus

Also Known As: Greek Tantalos; king of Sipylus; the figure behind the English verb “tantalise”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Stolen nectar and ambrosia made him deathless, which is the only reason his punishment has no end.
Role in Mythos: He is the first great impious mortal of Greek myth and the root of the cursed house that runs down through Pelops to Agamemnon.
Relation to Humans: He was a human being himself, a rich Anatolian king who ate at the table of the gods and passed their food down to his drinking companions. What that generosity bought was a curse on four generations of his own descendants and a name that survives in ordinary speech as a word for wanting something held just out of reach.

The water comes up to his chin, and it has done for a very long time. When he lowers his head to drink, the pool draws back from his mouth and leaves black earth steaming at his feet, dry as a threshing floor. When he straightens, the water returns. Above him the branches hang low and loaded: pears and pomegranates, apples with a shine on them, sweet figs, olives fat on the bough. He reaches. The wind lifts the fruit away toward the clouds, holds it up there a moment, then lets it swing back down to within a hand’s width of his fingers. That last part is the design. A punishment that simply denied him would have been over in a week.

Odysseus watched it happen, standing among the dead in the eleventh book of the Odyssey, and Homer names the sufferer only as an old man.

Before the pool, Tantalus was a king. His seat was Sipylus, in the western hills of Anatolia where Lydia runs into Phrygia, and his wealth was proverbial in the way few fortunes ever manage: a Greek who wanted to name an unimaginable sum said “the talents of Tantalus” and was understood. His father was Zeus. His mother was Plouto, a daughter of Cronus and Rhea, which gave him Titans on one side and the sky on the other. Nobody could agree on his wife; the name comes down variously as Euryanassa, Eurythemista, Clytie and Dione. His children are not in dispute, and they are the reason any of this matters. He fathered Pelops, who gave his name to the Peloponnese. He fathered Niobe, who boasted about her fourteen children in front of Leto and then watched Apollo and Artemis kill every one of them. He fathered Broteas, a hunter who slighted Artemis and walked into a fire.

The first generation of mortals, the stories say, ate at the same table as the gods, and Tantalus was on the list. Picture him there with the smoke going straight up and the talk moving around him, dipping from the same mixing bowl as Zeus, and slipping a small stoppered flask inside his clothing while nobody is watching the guest. Down in Sipylus that week, his drinking friends taste nectar.

Antiquity could never settle on what exactly he did wrong, and the three answers it produced sit badly together. In the mildest, he only talked, carrying what the gods intended for humankind back down the mountain to people with no business hearing it. In the second he stole, lifting nectar and ambrosia from the table and handing them round at his own parties. In the third, the one that stuck to him, he cooked his son.

The account runs that he wanted to know whether divine omniscience had a floor to it. So he killed Pelops, jointed him, and put him in the pot. The smell of stewed meat rose through a hall in Sipylus and the gods at his table went very still, all of them but one. Demeter, hollowed out by the loss of Persephone and not paying attention to her food, took a piece from the shoulder and swallowed it before anyone could reach her. The gods gathered the boy back into the cauldron and he came out whole, with a shoulder of ivory where the missing one had been.

Pindar would have none of it. Composing for Hieron of Syracuse in 476 BC, he stopped the story mid-telling and refused to carry it: it is impossible, he said, to call one of the blessed gods a glutton, and he stood back from it. In his version Poseidon fell in love with the boy and carried him off on golden horses to the house of Zeus, and the cannibal feast was a lie put about by an envious neighbour when the search parties came back empty. Pindar keeps the theft, though. Tantalus stole the nectar and ambrosia that had already made him immortal and gave it away to the men he drank with. He could not digest his own good fortune.

There is a fourth story, and it is the strangest. Rhea set a golden dog in the Cretan cave to guard the infant Zeus and the goat that fed him. Pandareus stole the dog and left it at Sipylus with Tantalus for safekeeping. When he came back for it, Tantalus swore an oath that he had never had it. Hermes was sent to collect and Tantalus swore again. Zeus turned Pandareus to stone where he stood and put Mount Sipylus down on Tantalus’s head. Pindar and Euripides both keep a version of that weight, thinned to a single rock hanging in the air above him, never falling, never going away, a fourth labour on top of the thirst and the hunger and the branches.

For a man this famous, nobody described him. Homer gives an old man in water and stops there. Painters in fourth-century Apulia show him with one arm up, pointing at a cliff, which tells us which version of the crime they had heard rather than anything about his face. The record is silent on his height, his build and his voice, and it stays silent because what the Greeks wanted from him was the posture, not the portrait.

What he had going for him was real enough. Divine parentage, a mountain full of ore, a seat at the table, and the immortality he drank his way into. That last one is the trap closing. The nectar worked exactly as advertised, and because it worked he cannot die out of the sentence, which is why the sentence was chosen. His weaknesses were his mouth and his certainty: he told secrets, he swore a false oath twice over, and he built an entire experiment on the assumption that gods can be fed something without knowing what it is. The gods knew. The house he founded went on paying anyway, through Pelops to Atreus and Thyestes, to Agamemnon dead in his bath.

Travelling in the second century AD, Pausanias was shown a lake in Anatolia called after Tantalus and a grave beside it that he calls by no means obscure. On a peak above the sanctuary of Plastene the Mother there was a throne of Pelops, and cut into the rock nearby the oldest image of the Mother of the Gods the Magnesians knew, which they said Broteas had carved. Strabo and Pausanias both record earthquakes throwing that country down, marshes flooding, and the city of Tantalis going under a lake.

The verb we took from him preserves the mechanism precisely. To tantalise is not to withhold. It is to bring the thing back within reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Tantalus in Greek mythology?

Tantalus was a mortal king of Sipylus, a wealthy Anatolian kingdom on the border of Lydia and Phrygia, and a son of Zeus by Plouto. He was among the first generation of humans permitted to dine with the gods. He was the father of Pelops, Niobe and Broteas, and the founder of the cursed line that runs down to Agamemnon.

What was the punishment of Tantalus?

Tantalus stands forever in a pool of water that drains away whenever he stoops to drink, beneath fruit-laden branches that the wind lifts out of reach whenever he grasps at them. Homer describes the scene in Book 11 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus sees him among the dead. Some accounts add a rock suspended over his head that never falls.

Why was Tantalus punished by the gods?

The sources give three different crimes and never settle between them. In one he revealed the gods’ secrets to other mortals; in another he stole nectar and ambrosia from the divine table and shared them with his drinking companions; in the best known he killed his son Pelops, cooked him, and served him to the gods to test whether they truly knew everything. A separate tradition punishes him for perjury over a stolen golden dog belonging to Zeus.

Did Tantalus really serve his son Pelops to the gods?

That is the most widely repeated version, in which Demeter, distracted by grief for Persephone, ate a piece of the boy’s shoulder before the other gods stopped the meal, and Pelops was restored with a shoulder of ivory. Pindar rejected the story outright in 476 BC as an impious slander invented by an envious neighbour, arguing that Poseidon had carried Pelops away out of love. Both versions circulated in antiquity side by side.

Where does the word “tantalise” come from?

The English verb comes directly from Tantalus and his punishment. It describes not the simple denial of something but the repeated offering and withdrawal of it, exactly as the water and the fruit behave in Homer’s account.