According to one version of the myth of Tantalos narrated by the Greek lyric poet Pindaros of Thebes (lived c. 518 – 438 BC) in his “First Olympian Ode,” Tantalos was a king of the land of Phrygia, which is located in Anatolia, which is now Turkey.
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Tantalos was favored by the gods and they would often visit him to eat at his table. Tantalos, however, wanted to find out if the gods were really all-knowing, so he murdered his own son Pelops, butchered his flesh, and served him to the gods in a feast.
The gods instantly knew what the meat Tantalos was serving them was. None of them ate any of the meat—except Demeter, who was mourning the loss of her beloved daughter Persephone and was not paying close enough attention to realize that it was human flesh. Demeter ate Pelops’s shoulder.
In anger, Zeus hurled Tantalos into the depths of Tartaros. In Tartaros, Tantalos is tortured for all of eternity for his crimes against nature and against the gods. He is forced to stand with water up to his waist and a bough of fruit hanging over his head. He is perpetually starving and parched, but every time he tries to drink the water, it drains away just beyond his lips and every time he tries to pluck one of the fruits, the wind blows the branch just out of his reach. Then, when he withdraws his hand or his lips, the water rises back to where it was and the branch lowers back down to where it was. Tantalos’s name is the root of our modern English word tantalize.
Once Tantalos had been taken care of, the gods brought Pelops’s butchered and cooked remains to the Moirai, who placed them in a boiling cauldron. Using the cauldron, the Moirai brought Pelops back to life. Pelops was missing his shoulder, though, since Demeter had eaten it, so the gods made him a new shoulder out of ivory.