Tantalus enjoys a closeness to the Olympian gods that almost no other mortal shares, dining at their tables and, by most tellings, favored as a son of Zeus himself, ruling wealthy Lydia from the city later associated with Mount Sipylus. What ends the friendship is told two different ways in the surviving sources. The darker and older strand has Tantalus test whether the gods truly see everything by killing his own son Pelops, cooking him, and serving the meal to the assembled Olympians, who recognize the crime instantly and refuse to eat, except for the grieving Demeter, distracted by the loss of her daughter Persephone, who consumes a shoulder before the deception is caught.
Pelops is restored to life with an ivory shoulder replacing the eaten one. Pindar, writing centuries after the story first circulates, rejects this version outright as slander unworthy of the gods and offers instead that Tantalus stole nectar and ambrosia from the divine table to share with mortal friends, or spoke openly of secrets he had overheard at the gods' councils, an offense of theft and disclosure rather than murder, though the later mythographic tradition preserves both stories side by side without fully resolving which one is meant to be true.