And then an allusion to the glory which this victory has given to Hiero in the Peloponnese, "the isle of Pelops," introduces us at once to the legendary history of that hero.
He was the son of Tantalus, and the favourite of Poseidon the Sea-god. Tantalus, the Lydian king, had enjoyed, but forfeited by some crime, the privilege of an extraordinary intimacy with the gods—he had shared their feasts, and entertained them at his table in return. Yet this favoured prince became at last a terrible monument of divine vengeance. He was sent to join Ixion and Sisyphus in Tartarus, tormented (according to some authors) by immersion in a pool of water, which receded whenever his lips approached it, while fruit just out of reach hung perpetually above his head.[1] Pindar follows a different legend, and imagines a huge stone, ever threatening to fall, poised magically above his head.
And why this change? Legends, or according to Pindar "some envious neighbour," told a hideous tale of a "caldron," in which Tantalus, preparing to feast the gods, had boiled the mangled body of his son. The frightful banquet had begun, when the crime was discovered, and Clotho, the goddess of Pate, drew from the caldron the revivified body of Pelops. One shoulder only was missing—Ceres had unfortunately swallowed it; but the place of the absent limb was ingeniously supplied by one of ivory! And so Tantalus was hurled to his well-merited doom in Tartarus. Pindar will have none of this revolting legend. The
- ↑ Hence our word "to tantalise."
