Tantalus

Tantalus is a character from Greek mythology. His punishment by the gods is so famous that it led to a whole English word being named after him: tantalising! There are many different versions of this myth, but he is always depicted as a tyrannical, greedy and ambitious king whose self-serving actions lead to him angering the gods.

When it comes to a character like Tantalus, there is no such thing as a single ‘true’ story of what he did. That’s true of most Greek mythology, to be honest! In fact, it’s true of all folktales and mythological stories across all cultures.

These stories were mostly part of their respective cultures’ oral traditions, so they would change as people passed them on to one another. Plus, the stories reflect the discussions, anxieties and cultural ideas of their times. So, as these things changed, the stories adapted to go with them.

There are so many different retellings of the same stories, with different storytellers putting their own spins on them. People at the time would have believed different things based on their experiences, where they lived, what age it was and what they could learn from the story.

However, some of the versions of Tantalus’s story are more popular than others. These more popular versions tend to influence art and literature much more than the more obscure ones. So, we’ll go through those and tell you the most interesting things about Tantalus as a character. Then, we’ll link it back to examples that might be useful to you.

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The tale of Tantalus

In most of the mythology about him, Tantalus is the king of Sipylus, which is in modern-day Turkey. Like many other mortal figures in Greek mythology, he is related to the gods: his father is Zeus and his mother is Pluto.

Unlike many other mortal figures, though, he is not a demigod. His father is a god, and his mother is either a titaness or a nymph, so he’s not part human. Instead, he’s one of the first morals.

According to the myths, Zeus invited Tantalus to dine with the gods on Mount Olympus. During dinner, he disrespects them, provoking their wrath.

There are multiple versions of what he does, depending on which source or legend you’re reading. The main ones are:

• Stealing nectar and ambrosia from the gods to bring back to his kingdom for the other mortals.
• Spreading gossip and secrets of what the gods did at the banquet table when he returns to the mortal world.
• Stealing a golden dog, which was created by Hephaestus as an offering to Zeus.

One of the most gruesome versions says that Tantalus invited the gods to have a banquet at his palace. Thinking he can trick the gods, he kills his own son, Pelops. Tantalus cuts his son’s body up, cooks him and serves him as a meal during the banquet.

In this version of the story, most gods are able to see through his trickery and don’t eat the meat he presents them. However, Demeter isn’t paying attention. She is more concerned with the fact that Hades has taken her daughter, Persephone, to his realm. Because of that, she accidentally eats part of the food.

The gods are angry and disgusted with Tantalus for three main reasons:

• He killed his own son.
• He tried to make them eat human meat.
• His arrogance made him think that he could outsmart them.

Some versions of Tantalus’s story combine these different reasons to create complex stories. For example, it’s common for Tantalus to invite the gods to his palace to make up for upsetting them when he was dining at Olympus. In those versions of the story, he feeds his son to them to get back at them for punishing him in the first place.

Tantalus’s punishment

There are also many different versions of his punishment in Tartarus.

One of the most common punishments appears in Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus descends into the realm of Hades, he sees that Tantalus is standing in a lake with water up to his neck or chin. Right in front of him, there’s an orchard full of trees of every fruit you can think of. The fruit is on low-hanging branches, so it looks easy for him to reach out and take some.

In reality, it’s not that simple. Every time he reaches out for a piece of fruit, the wind blows the branches away. When he tries to drink the water from the lake surrounding him, it recedes so it’s out of his reach.

That leaves him in a constant state of hunger and thirst that he can never do anything about. The object of his desire is right in front of him, but also impossibly out of his reach. In other words, it’s tantalising him.

Then, there are other versions of the myth in which Tantalus has a rock hovering over his head. In the earlier versions of this, he is punished for tricking Zeus into allowing him to live like a god. The gods are bound to grant the wishes that they promise to grant, so Zeus has to make Tantalus live like a god.

But while Zeus does fulfil the wish, he uses the rock to make sure that Tantalus can never enjoy the god-like banquets he is now invited to. It’s a constant source of worry and anxiety, because he never knows when it could fall and crush him.

Some versions and pieces of art combine these punishments. That means that Tantalus has to stand over the lake while he’s hungry and thirsty, and also deal with the anxiety of having the rock hovering over him!

There’s also a simpler version where Zeus just smites him without any lasting consequences for his soul.

What happened to Pelops?

Although Pelops is resurrected by Zeus, it isn’t as simple as just snapping his fingers and fixing things. They put Pelops back together piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle. But the problem is that Demeter has still eaten his shoulder! So they can’t just put that part of him back where it belongs.

To help him, Demeter provides him with a replacement shoulder made from ivory. Either she creates it for him herself, or she asks Hephaestus to craft it.

There are versions of the story that say that Tantalus doesn’t actually kill Pelops at all! Instead, these versions argue that it was all a cover-up because Poseidon had fallen in love with Pelops and wanted to take him to Mount Olympus to be his apprentice.

This kind of thing is quite common in Greek mythology. Many of the gods are portrayed as bisexual or pansexual.

The versions where Pelops survives are interesting. They combine two of the main reasons why Tantalus was punished. Pelops being cut up and served to the gods is a lie in this version. But after Pelops spends some time in Olympus, Zeus casts him out because Tantalus is caught either stealing food or gossiping about the gods.

In many versions of the stories, Pelops becomes an important mythological figure in his own right. He marries Hippodamia, the princess of Pisa (the one in Greece, not Italy), and becomes the king of her kingdom after winning a chariot race against her father, Oenomaus, and killing him.

Sometimes versions of this story say that Pelops or his soon-to-be wife, Princess Hippodamia, bribed Oenomaus’s charioteer to win the race. After winning, He kills the charioteer, who then curses him and his whole bloodline. It seems that trickery is not an uncommon thing in this family!

Tantalus’s descendents

It isn’t just Tantalus and Pelops that are well-known in Greek mythology. He is the originator of the House of Atreus, which is all over most of the biggest stories that the Ancient Greeks ever came up with. Some of Tantalus’s descendants include:

• Pelops
• Niobe
• Atreus
• Agamemnon
• Iphigenia
• Orestes
• Electra
• Menelaus

One of the most well-known things about this family is that there seemed to be a curse on them. All of the prominent members of the House of Atreus commit horrible crimes, often involving killing their own family, adultery, incest and even cannibalism!

Some people say that it was the original act by Tantalus that cursed the family. That would make sense! After all, so many of his descendants killed family members just like he did with Pelops. However, as I mentioned before, Pelops was cursed by the charioteer he murdered, Myrtilus. For some people, it’s both: Tantalus’s evil act put an original curse on the family that was exacerbated by Pelops’s actions.

Out of these family members, you might recognise Menelaus. His wife, Helen of Troy, was so beautiful that men would start wars for her. In fact, that’s exactly what happened! She fell in love with a Trojan prince named Paris and left Menelaus for him. That sparked the Trojan War: the one covered in Homer’s Iliad that has the Trojan Horse in it! It’s also the war that Odysseus is returning from in the Odyssey.

You might also know the name, Agamemnon. When the Trojan War starts, King Agamemnon sails out to back his brother. At the end of the war, he returns to his home with his new concubine, the pregnant Cassandra. When they arrive, they are both murdered by Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, because she is having an affair and wants to leave with her affair partner, Aegisthus.

Electra is the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. When she finds out what her mother has done, Electra encourages and helps her brother, Orestes, to avenge her father’s death. Together, they kill their mother and her affair partner.

It really is no joke that Tantalus and Pelops screwed the family over with their curses! And these family members aren’t the only ones who have done horrible things! Agamemnon’s father murdered his nephews and fed them to their father, his twin brother Atreus (hence the family name)! It’s just a very messy family.

Use in literature, art, media and culture

As you can see, there are loads of versions of Tantalus’s story. Sometimes, they work well together. Other times, they can get very contradictory! But that’s not too important. The main thing that matters is how Tantalus’s story influences our language, storytelling and art today.

In English, we have the word ‘tantalising’. It refers to something that we desire, but which is frustratingly out of our reach. Of course, it comes from the version of Tantalus’s punishment where he desperately tries to get some fruit or water.

However, despite the fact that his story has clearly stuck with us, there are surprisingly few explicit mentions of Tantalus in literature outside of the classics of Greek and Roman mythology.

The writer, Dante Alighieri, doesn’t mention him directly, but seems to draw inspiration from him for his work, Inferno. In it, he talks about ‘contrapasso’, the idea of fitting a punishment to match the sin of the damned. It seems to be inspired by how personal and bespoke the punishments of Tantalus and other Greek mythological figures, like Calypso and Sisyphus, are.

Mentions of Tantalus in The Duchess of Malfi

One of the main references to Tantalus in English literature comes from The Duchess of Malfi by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, John Webster.

One of the most important characters in this play is Bosola, the man who embodies the role of the Malcontent (and, arguably, the avenger) in the play.

In Act 1, Scene 1 of the play, Bosola enters after the Cardinal, whom he begs for recognition. He follows the Cardinal around, trying to remind him that he hired Bosola to kill someone in the past. Because of the Cardinal’s orders, Bosola was sent to work in the galleys, so he wants the Cardinal to compensate him.

The Cardinal, on the other hand, is determined to pretend that nothing happened. He doesn’t want to recognise his part in the crime or get his hands dirty. So, he tells Bosola that he wishes he could be ‘honest’ and leaves.

This leaves Bosola on stage with two other characters, Antonio and Delio. Antonio asks Bosola what’s wrong, and Bosola rants for a while about how terrible the Cardinal and his brother, Ferdinand, are. One of the things he says is this:

Who would rely upon these miserable dependencies, in expectation to be advanc’d tomorrow? What creature ever fed worse than hoping Tantalus?

Here, Bosola is using the story of Tantalus to explain why he knows he should give up on the idea of the Cardinal paying what he owes. He suggests that Tantalus’s hope is one of the worst miseries that someone could face. Tantalus is always hoping he’ll be able to reach for the food and drink he craves, which means he’s always in despair.

Bosola argues that people who just give up feel less despair because they’re not constantly living through the hope over and over again.

This helps us to get a good picture of Bosola as a pessimistic character who tries to accept that life is hard and there’s nothing he can do about it. For him, the worst torture doesn’t come from the initial punishment. Instead, it comes from constantly hoping that life could be different. That’s such a typical Malcontent thought process!

Tantalus in the Percy Jackson universe

In Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, Tantalus plays a much more comical role.

He serves as the camp counsellor of Camp Half-Blood in the second book of the series, after Chiron is fired as camp leader.

Rick Riordan chooses to portray Tantalus as an unambiguously evil and manipulative character who doesn’t care about the fates of the campers in his care. He makes them do dangerous games and makes decisions that actively put them all in harm’s way. It makes sense that he’s portrayed like this, since Riordan follows the version of Tantalus’s story where he killed and cooked his own son. If a parent is able to do such a horrible thing to his own child, why would he care what happens to a bunch of demigods that have nothing to do with him?

The comedy comes from how Riordan chooses to portray Tantalus reaching for the food. It’s more like a cat-and-mouse situation, where Tantalus keeps grabbing for the good at Camp Half-Blood, only for it to jump away from him at the last minute. He keeps trying, and his eternal starvation is less gruesome and more of a running joke throughout the series. There’s even a point when he almost gets to grab the food he wants, only for him to lose at the last moment!

Where can you learn more?

I hope I have given you a good, comprehensive understanding of the character of Tantalus in this glossary article. However, please don’t just take my word for it! In an age where AI-generated articles are finding their way into academic journals full of hallucinations, it’s more important than ever that you confirm that any new information you discover is actually true. A great way to do that is to check multiple different sources.

Here are some of the sources I recommend to learn more about Tantalus and Greek mythology in general. The websites are largely free, while I earn from the affiliate links to books:

• The Complete World of Greek Mythology by Richard Buxton
• Mythology by Edith Hamilton
• Mythos by Stephen Fry
• Britannica
• GreekMythology.com
• World History Encyclopedia

Also, if any references come up in the future, we can chat about them on our Community! So feel free to join so we can continue the discussion in a way that will actually stick!