by Parmjit Singh
Tantalus made way in contemporary diction with the word ‘tantalize’, meaning, to tempt seductively enough so the tantalized remains on the edge, proverbially and literally.
Etymologically, the word Tantalize comes from Greek mythology and is tied to a person named ‘Tantalus’. Such were his misdemeanors in life, as the myth goes, that the Gods decided to punish him in his afterlife by keeping him hungry and thirsty in the midst of a pool of water under a fruit-laden tree.
As the story goes, Tantalus was invited to the table of Zeus in Olympus. He brought back nectar and ambrosia by stealing and revealed the secret of Gods to his people. And he did not stop there. Such was his consumption with the whole affair that he even sacrificed his son Pelops whom he cut up, boiled and then served to the Gods. However, all the Gods except one, did not fall for his ploy and refused to partake his offering. Outraged by this blatancy, Zeus ordered Fate to bring Pelops back to life and reconstitute him. Gods then punished Tantalus by making him stand in a pool of water under a fruit-laden tree where he could neither be able to drink water nor pluck fruits.
Tantalus, thus, becomes a symbol of temptation without any gratification—he, who stood in the pool of water under a fruit-laden tree but every time he bent to sip water, it receded away and each time he jumped to pluck fruit, the braches flew away. For Tantalus, it was all ordained by Gods as a punishment for his diabolical deeds.
But the story does not end at Tantalus’s afterlife admonition, we all are a symbol of it and replay his story each day in our life. Are we not always ‘tantalized’ by the illusory materialism of the modern life? Tantalus also becomes a metaphor of the human mind that keeps us tempted, on the tenterhooks, and forces us to flit from one desire to another without ever coming close to gratification; although we stand in the pool of happiness we eternally remain sad, craving for things that are inaccessible and depriving oneself from the available sources of happiness. The only way we would differ from Tantalus is that he suffered deprivation in his afterlife while we undergo his tease everyday in one form or the other, in our very ‘present’ life.
