A King’s Divine Punishment Gave Rise to a Word That Survives to This Day in English
In Greek legend, Tantalus was a king of Sypilus in Lydia, in western Anatolia. He was the father of Pelops, after whom the Peloponnesus is named. Tantalus was also the great grandfather of Menelaus, the Spartan king and cuckolded husband of Helen of Troy, and his brother Agamemnon, who commanded the Greeks in the Trojan War. Another of Tantalus’ children was Niobe, who got her own dose of divine punishment and earned an entry on this list – see below.
Tantalus was a son of Zeus and a nymph – minor female nature deities, typically depicted as uninhibited nubile maidens who love to sing and dance. As a son of Zeus, Tantalus was on intimate terms with the gods, and was often invited to dine with them at their table in the heavens. However, he ended up abusing that divine favor, committed a variety of offenses that angered the Olympians, and brought divine punishment upon himself.
One of Tantalus’ sins was stealing ambrosia and nectar, the food of the gods, and giving it to mortals. He also liked to blab, and revealed to mortals secrets he had learned at the table of the gods in heaven. However, what offended the divine pantheon the most was when Tantalus killed his own son, Pelops, and served him to the gods at a banquet as a means of testing their powers of observation.
The only deity to touch the food was the goddess Demeter, who was distracted by the death of her daughter, Persephone, and absent-mindedly ate part of Pelops’ shoulder. Zeus gathered the rest of the boy’s body parts, got the god Hephaestus to make him a bronze shoulder, put them all together and restored the kid to life. Zeus then turned on Tantalus, and subjected him to the wrath of the gods.
Zeus destroyed Tantalus, then personally took his soul to Hades, the underworld of Greek mythology. There, the chief god devised a punishment that became a proverbial term for temptation. Tantalus was placed in a pool of water, beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the wind wafted the branches away, and whenever he reached for water to take a drink it flowed away from him. Thus he was tormented by everlasting hunger and thirst, despite food and water being so near. It is from Tantalus’ punishment, of desperately wanting something that seems so close but that is just beyond reach, that we get the English word “tantalize”.
While Tantalus’ divine punishment and other supernatural aspects of his story are mythical, there might have been a historical king Tantalus in real life, who ruled an Anatolian city named Tantalis. The geographer Strabo, citing earlier sources, described the wealth of Tantalus as driving from mines in Mount Sypilus. In the second century, AD, the geographer Pausanias reported seeing a sepulcher of Tantalus, and visiting a port bearing his name. Archaeological evidence also attests to the existence of a king Tantalus in ancient times.