Tantalus: A Preoedipal Figure of Myth

'Tantalus
And Sisyphus were kings long years ago,
And now they lie in the lake dolorous;
The hills of hell are noisy with their woe.'

Thrice familiar as is, in all the mythologies of the world, the 'oedipal' conflict between father and son, as illustrated in its most undisguised and undistorted form in the legend of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, and as echoed in innumerable variants of this theme in which distortion and disguise have been brought in extremely varying degrees to bear, it might be of interest to consider one of the lesser figures in the vast corpus of Greek mythology, all of whose connotations appear to be preoedipal in character. And in this respect, though he be a lesser figure in Greek myth, he does not stand alone.

When Ulysses visited the Underworld—as has many another from Gilgamesh to Jesus—he found there, Homer tells us, three penitents 'suffering great anguish'.1 There was the giant, Tityos, son of Earth, bound fast as he lay stretched upon the ground, while two vultures tore, one on either side, at his liver. There was Tantalus, who stood neck-deep in a pool of water which ever receded as he sought to drink of it, while a wind tossed always out of his reach the manifold fruits which hung just above his head; or, with or without hunger and thirst, he suffered eternal fear, 'dreading the crag which topples o'er his head',2 hung there in mid-air by Zeus.3 And the third was Sisyphus, condemned eternally to roll a 'pitiless' stone up a hill whence as unceasingly it rolled down again.