Tantalus

Tantalus is the mortal the gods honored most and punished longest. Pausanias calls him the son of Zeus and Pluto, and says he saw his grave on Mount Sipylus in Lydia. In Euripides's Orestes he is the reputed son of Zeus. Pindar's first Olympian Ode says that if the watchers of Olympus ever honored a mortal man, that man was Tantalus.

The oldest account of his punishment is in Homer's Odyssey. In Book 11, Odysseus sees him among the dead, standing in a pool with the water at his chin. Whenever the old man stoops to drink, the water vanishes and black earth shows at his feet. Pears, pomegranates, apples, figs and olives hang over his head. Whenever he reaches for them, the wind tosses them toward the clouds. Homer gives no reason for any of it.

Pindar tells a different story in his first Olympian Ode. Tantalus invited the gods to a banquet at Sipylus. Poseidon, overcome with desire for his son Pelops, carried the boy off to the house of Zeus. When Pelops could not be found, Pindar says, an envious neighbor whispered that the gods had cut him up, boiled him and eaten him. Pindar refuses to call any god a glutton.

Pindar's Tantalus falls through greed instead. He could not digest his great prosperity. He stole from the gods the nectar and ambrosia with which they had made him immortal, and gave them to his drinking companions. For that, the Father hung a mighty stone over his head, and he wanders far from all festivity. Because of his crime, the gods sent Pelops back to the race of mortal men.

Other writers kept the story Pindar rejected. Apollodorus's Epitome says Pelops was slaughtered and boiled at the banquet of the gods and came back to life fairer than before. It does not say who killed him. Ovid's Metamorphoses names his father's hands. The gods rejoined the boy's limbs, Ovid says, but part of one shoulder was missing, so they set ivory in its place. Pindar knows the ivory shoulder too, but gives it no such cause.

Euripides and Apollodorus add other charges. In the Orestes, Electra says Tantalus hangs in the air, cowering under a rock, because he could not bridle his tongue after sharing the gods' feasts. Apollodorus reports that some say he blabbed the gods' mysteries to men and tried to share ambrosia with his fellows. His punishment in Apollodorus joins both traditions: a stone over him, a lake that dries when he drinks, and fruit trees the winds lift away.

Tantalus stands at the head of a family that kept killing its own. Euripides's Electra traces it from Tantalus to Pelops, from Pelops to Atreus, and from Atreus to Agamemnon and Menelaus. Later in the play she longs to reach the rock that swings on golden chains between earth and heaven, to lament to Tantalus, forefather of her house.

His daughter Niobe carries the family flaw to Thebes. Apollodorus makes her the daughter of Tantalus and the wife of Amphion. In Ovid, she boasts that her father alone was allowed to touch the tables of the gods. Leto complains that Niobe has her father's tongue. In Apollodorus, Artemis shoots down Niobe's daughters and Apollo kills her sons, and Niobe goes back to her father at Sipylus.

A further crime appears in later writers. Pausanias says the Cretan Pandareos was implicated in the theft of Tantalus and in the trick of the oath, but does not say what was stolen. The mythographer Antoninus Liberalis tells the fuller story in his Metamorphoses. Pandareos stole the golden dog that guarded Zeus's sacred place in Crete and gave it to Tantalus to keep. When Pandareos asked for it back, Tantalus swore he had never received it. Zeus struck Tantalus with a thunderbolt and set Mount Sipylus on his head.

Pausanias thought the hanging stone came from the poet Archilochus. Describing Polygnotus's painting of the underworld at Delphi, he says Tantalus suffers all the pains Homer describes, and also the terror of a stone above him. Polygnotus followed Archilochus, Pausanias says, though he could not tell whether Archilochus invented the stone. Plato's Cratylus reads the name itself as a pun on the balancing of that stone.

The stone became a figure of speech. In his eighth Isthmian Ode, Pindar says a god has turned aside the stone of Tantalus above our heads, an unbearable hardship for Greece. The pool and the fruit lasted too. When Juno goes down to the underworld in Ovid's Metamorphoses, she sees Tantalus unable to catch the water. When Orpheus sings to the dead in Ovid's Book 10, Tantalus stops reaching for the wave, the moment retold in Orpheus in the Underworld.

The name belongs to more than one figure. Pausanias saw a grave at Argos said to hold a Tantalus who was the son of Thyestes or Broteas and married Clytemnestra before Agamemnon did. He insists this is not the son of Zeus, whose grave is on Sipylus. Near that mountain, Pausanias says, there is still a lake called after Tantalus and a famous grave.