Tantalus  Tantalus ( "Tántalos") was a Greek mythological figure, most famous for his eternal punishment in Tartarus. He was also called Atys. He was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink. He was the father of Pelops, Niobe and Broteas, and was a son of Zeus and the nymph Plouto. Thus, like other heroes in Greek mythology such as Theseus and the Dioskouroi, Tantalus had both a hidden, divine parent and a mortal one. The Greeks used the proverb "Tantalean punishments" (), in reference to those who have good things but are not permitted to enjoy them. Plato in the "Cratylus" (395e) interprets "Tantalos" as ταλάντατος "talantatos" (acc. ταλάντατον in the original), "who has to bear much" from τάλας "talas" "wretched" (now the word "talas" is held to be inherited from Proto-Indo-European). Beekes rejects an Indo-European interpretation. There may have been a historical Tantalus, possibly the ruler of an Anatolian city named "Tantalís", "the city of Tantalus", or of a city named "Sipylus". Pausanias reports that there was a port under his name and a sepulcher of him "by no means obscure", in the same region. Tantalus is referred to as "Phrygian", and sometimes even as "King of Phrygia", although his city was located in the western extremity of Anatolia, where Lydia was to emerge as a state before the beginning of the first millennium BC, and not in the traditional heartland of Phrygia, situated more inland. References to his son as "Pelops the Lydian" led some scholars to the conclusion that there would be good grounds for believing that he belonged to a primordial house of Lydia. Other versions name his father as Tmolus, the name of a king of Lydia and, like Sipylus, of another mountain in ancient Lydia. The location of Tantalus' mortal mountain-fathers generally placed him in Lydia; and more seldom in Phrygia or Paphlagonia, all in Asia Minor.