The Wheel of Ixion became a popular subject for artists and sculptors and the phrase ‘a wheel of fire’ is sometimes used to describe an agonizing burden, punishment or duty.fn3 The expression ‘to pile Pelion on Ossa’ is seen too, meaning to add difficulty to difficulty.
Tantalus
Perhaps the best-known torment the gods ever devised is that which was dreamed up for the wicked King Tantalus. The consequences of his crimes had ramifications that rang down through the years. The curse upon his house was not lifted until the very end of the mythic age.
Tantalus ruled the kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor, the region later known as the Turkish province of Anatolia. Mineral deposits from nearby Mount Sipylus had yielded him enormous riches, from which he established a prosperous city that he immodestly called Tantalis. He married DIONE (one of the Hyades, or rain nymphs, who had suckled the infant Dionysus) and by her had a son, PELOPS, and a daughter, NIOBE.fn4
Either there was a kink in Tantalus’s personality or his power and wealth had fooled him into believing himself equal to the gods. Like Ixion before him he made the mistake of abusing Zeus’s hospitality, in his case by returning from a banquet on Olympus with stolen ambrosia and nectar in his pockets. He also committed the unpardonable solecism of telling tales about the private lives and mannerisms of the gods, amusing his courtiers and friends with insolent mimicry and gossip.
But then he committed a blood murder, one even worse than Ixion’s crime of casting his father-in-law into a pit of burning coals. Hearing that the Olympians were furious at his mockery and the theft of their nectar and ambrosia, he made a great show of repentance and begged that they accept his own hospitality in recompense for his misconduct.
Now, all of this took place around the time Demeter was searching for her abducted daughter Persephone. In her grief she had allowed all growing things to wither and die. The world was barren and infertile and no one knew how long this would last. The prospect of a feast came as a welcome excitement. Knowing of the opulent and ostentatious lifestyle of King Tantalus, the gods were greatly looking forward to the legendary pleasures of his table.fn5 They were in for a shock.
As the Pelasgian king Lycaon had done before him, Tantalus served up his own son to the gods. The young Pelops was killed, jointed, roasted, slathered in a rich sauce and set before them. They sensed instantly that something was wrong and declined to eat. But Demeter, whose mind was wholly on her lost daughter, distractedly picked at and ate the boy’s left shoulder.
When Zeus understood what had happened, he summoned one of the three Fates, Clotho, the spinner. She collected the body parts, stirred them in a great cauldron and put them back together. Demeter, awakened to her dreadful lapse, commissioned Hephaestus to carve a shoulder from ivory to replace the one she had consumed. Clotho attached the prosthetic, which fitted perfectly. Zeus breathed into the boy’s body and Pelops stirred back into life.
Pelops’s great beauty attracted Poseidon, and for a while they became lovers. Yet darker forces were at work with the youth, and his later life and deeds called down a curse upon him and all his house.fn6 Compounded with the curse earned by the abominable crime of Tantalus, this curse was to pursue his descendants down to the last of their line, ORESTES.
Tantalus himself was despatched straight to Tartarus and punished in a manner befitting one who dared tempt the gods into feasting on the flesh of the victim of a blood crime. He was placed in a pool of water up to his waist. Above his head waved the bough of a tree from which hung luscious and appetizing fruits. Hunger and thirst raged within him, but every time he stretched up to take a bite, the branch would swing out of his reach. Every time he stooped to drink, the waters of the pool would shrink back to deny him. He could not move away, for above him, threatening to crush him if he dared try to escape, hovered a great stone of the hard glaucus element that would one day be called ‘tantalum’.fn7
There Tantalus stands to this day, agonizingly close to satisfaction, but always denied it, enacting the tortured frustration that bears his name – tantalized, but never satisfied, until the end of time.fn8
Sisyphus
Brotherly Love
The eternal punishment Sisyphus endures in Hades has also entered language and lore, but there is much more to his story than the famous stone he is doomed endlessly and fruitlessly to push uphill. Sisyphus was a wicked, greedy, duplicitous and often cruel man, but who cannot find something appealing – heroic even – in the unquenchable zest and fist-shaking defiance with which he lived (in fact outlived) his life? Few mortals dared to try the patience of the gods in so reckless a fashion. His foolhardy contempt and refusal to apologize or conform put one in mind of a Grecian Don Giovanni.
Deucalion and Pyrrha, the survivors of the Great Flood, had had a son named HELLEN, after whom the Greeks to this day call themselves Hellenes. Hellen’s son AEOLUS had four sons – Sisyphus, SALMONEUS, Athamas and CRETHEUS. Sisyphus and Salmoneus hated each other with as visceral and implacable a hatred as the human world had yet witnessed. Rivals in their parents’ affections, rivals in everything, from the cradle neither could bear to see the other succeed. The two princes outgrew their father’s realm of Aeolia, as Thessaly was called in those days, and moved south and west to found their own kingdoms. Salmoneus ruled over Elis and Sisyphus established Ephyra, later called Corinth. From these fastnesses, they glared at each other across the Peloponnese, their bitter enmity growing with each passing year.
Sisyphus hated Salmoneus so much it robbed him of his sleep. He wanted him dead, dead, dead. The desire was so agonizing he stabbed himself repeatedly in the thigh with a dagger to relieve himself of it. But there was nothing he could do. The Furies would avenge themselves terribly if he dared murder a brother. Fratricide was amongst the worst of the blood crimes. Eventually he decided to consult the oracle at Delphi.
‘Sons of Sisyphus and Tyro rise to slay Salmoneus,’ intoned the Pythia.
This was sweet music to Sisyphus’s ears. TYRO was his niece, daughter of his hated brother Salmoneus. All Sisyphus had to do was marry and get sons from her. Sons who would ‘rise to slay Salmoneus’. Uncles could marry nieces without raising any eyebrows in those days and so he set about beguiling and seducing Tyro with horses, jewels, poems and oceans of personal charm, for Sisyphus was nothing if not captivating when he chose to be. In due course his wooing won her, they wed and she bore him two bouncing boys.
One day some years later, Sisyphus was out fishing with his friend MELOPS. Sunning themselves on the banks of the River Sythas, they fell into conversation. At exactly the same time, Tyro set out from the palace with a maid, the two boys – now aged five and three – and a hamper of food and wine, with the idea of surprising Sisyphus with a family picnic.
Back on the riverbank, Melops and Sisyphus talked lazily about horses, women, sport and war. Tyro’s group made their way across the fields.
‘Tell me, sire,’ said Melops, ‘it has always surprised me that despite your bitter feud with King Salmoneus, you chose to marry his daughter. For all that I can tell, you still dislike him as much as ever.’
‘Dislike him? I abominate, loathe, despise and abhor him,’ said Sisyphus with a loud laugh. A laugh that allowed the approaching Tyro to draw a bead on his exact position. As her party drew nearer she could now hear every word her husband spoke.