Tantalus Tantalised

There aren’t many myths which surpass the story of King Tantalus in terms of gruesomeness. In my opinion, Tantalus is the greatest waste of potential of a character. While other sons of gods were teaching heroic morals and slaying evils, Tantalus decided to pull a couple of pranks. Unlike other I-made-a-grave-mistake-and-pissed-off-the-gods mortals, Tantalus is either incredibly stupid or unfathomably brazen for putting himself in the spotlight (it’s probably both).

Tantalus was the son of Zeus and a nymph of Mount Siplus. Zeus favored him greatly and gave him the entire kingdom of Sipylus to rule. Tantalus then married Dione, a daughter of the Titan Atlas, and together they had three children: a daughter named Niobe, and two sons Pelops and Broteas. For being Zeus’s favorite child, he also regularly went out for dinner with the gods. Despite being blessed with part divinity and Zeus’s favor, Tantalus did not seem to recognize how lucky he was.

Quickly, Tantalus started racking up misdemeanors. Firstly, he tried to steal ambrosia from one of the god’s banquets. For obvious reasons (he tried to make himself immortal), bringing divine food into the mortal realm was a huge no-go. Then, he started spilling all the tea on Mt. Olympus with the rest of his courtiers. He also tried to steal one of Hephaestus’s golden dogs. The final straw was when he killed Pelops, his own son.

The Feast of Tantalus

Tantalus decided to play a prank on the gods. He invited them all to a banquet, where he served them a dish made from the body of his own son, cut up and cooked. When he saw the dish, Zeus instantly realized what was wrong. Unfortunately, Demeter had already taken a bite out of the meat. Cannibalism and filicide were two of the worst crimes any Greek could commit. Raging, Zeus threw Tantalus into Tartarus, the deepest part of the underworld reserved for only the worst sinners, and gave him a punishment fitting of his crime. He would have to stand chin deep in a pool of water, while an orchard of trees bearing every kind of fruit and a dangerously unbalanced stone hung above him. Everytime he tried to lean forward and drink, the water in the pool would recede out of reach. When he raised his head to eat, the branches would be blown away. What's more, he also had to live with the constant worry that the stone above him would fall and crush him. So, Tantalus was cursed to see food and water but never be able to touch them for all eternity.

Tantalus's pool

Zeus and the gods were able to restore Pelops’s body, though he did have to get a metal replacement for his shoulder after Demeter ate his original body. Pelops eventually regained his late father’s throne, but he also met an unhappy fate. For Tantalus’s crimes, Zeus cursed all of Tantalus’s current and future offspring to suffer. Pelops would be forced out of Sipylus by an invading army. His sons, Atreus and Thyestes, would also be sent into exile after murdering their half-brother. Atreus and Thyestes would become rulers of Mycenae next, but an argument between them would lead Atreus to kill Thyestes’s sons and feed them to their father. Atreus would then be killed by his own nephew, who passed down the curse to his two great-grandsons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, whose names should be very familiar to anyone that has read the Iliad. Agamemnon would be killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, who was then killed by Orestes, Agamemnon’s son.

Long story short: don’t piss off the gods, otherwise karma will get you back ten generations harder.