Eternal Thirst

Whichever offense the underworld punishes him for, every surviving account agrees on the sentence itself, and it is one of the most visually precise torments in Greek myth. Tantalus stands forever in a pool of water that reaches his chin, with branches heavy with fruit hanging just above his head, and both retreat the instant he tries to drink or eat: the water sinks away when he bends to it, and the wind lifts the branches out of reach when he stretches upward, so that he suffers hunger and thirst in the middle of apparent abundance rather than in simple deprivation. Some versions add a boulder balanced overhead, threatening to fall at any moment, layering the fear of sudden destruction on top of the endless, unsatisfied want.

Homer's Odyssey already describes the punishment in essentially this form when Odysseus sees Tantalus among the dead, which places the image among the oldest fixed points of the underworld tradition. The torment gives English its verb tantalize, to torment with something desired but kept just out of reach, making Tantalus one of a small number of mythic figures whose name survives in ordinary language independent of any conscious reference to the story behind it.