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Of the myriad tales which go to make up the huge body of Greek mythology, the story of the Feast of Tantalus is, I imagine, among the less familiar. But this disadvantage, if such it be, is more than compensated, I venture to think, by certain considerations which lend the story a special interest. In the first place, its manifest content is, perhaps, more than usually remote from its true meaning. Yet the knowledge of a single fact—one lying within the purview of anthropology—supplies immediately the key to this meaning. Even then, however, it is alone the application of psychoanalytic principles—revealing alike the underlying significance of the anthropological observation and of this Greek tale which is in a manner its echo, or, let us say, its counterpart in narrative form—which gives to the story of the Feast of Tantalus its true place, and this of the very highest, it might well be said, among the universal fantasies of mankind.
The principal characters in the 'dark and disreputable' story (as it seemed to Pindar who tells it) of the Feast of Tantalus are three in number, and represent three generations; for Tantalus was the son of Zeus, and Pelops the son of Tantalus.1 The story is told by Pindar in the First Olympian Ode.