Returning to the banquet hall, Tantalus served up the evil dish to the assembled gods. Slicing the corpse up, Tantalus crafted a fine dish, one which veiled its gruesome secret from mortal eyes. Cruel and heartless to the bone, Tantalus murdered his own son, Pelops, and boiled his flesh. Resolved to testing their so called omiscience, Tantalus decided upon a grisly trial. Tantalus invited the gods to try a dish of his own making, as gratitude for the warm hospitality they had granted him. The King of gods and men was unmoved, though he saw Tantalus' ploy, such envy was to be expected from mortals, who so frequently believed their own plight to be greater than that of all others. At the table of Olympus, the gods honoured Tantalus by allowing him to taste Ambrosia, and nectar, the drink which sustained the immortals. Through sleight of hand, Tantalus slipped a portion below the table, with an eye to sharing this majestic food with mortal men, out of spite for the gods. This substance was ambrosia, which sustained the ageless life of the immortals, and granted invulnerability to whomsoever should seek sustenance from it. Legend spoke of a magical substance that was the food of gods, a divine material borne to Olympus by doves shining white as the burning sun.

Far from being honoured at this request from on high, Tantalus decided to use this opportunity to put the gods to the test. However, his cruel leanings as yet unknown, one day Tantalus was invited to the dine at a banquet with the gods themselves, high on Mount Olympus (just as Ixion had been too, for this story, please click here). Soon, he began to to question the omnipotence of the Olympians. The bounty of the Earth, the reverence of man and the lineage of gods, however, had made Tantalus a proud man. King of the mighty realm of Phrygia too, he was a powerful man indeed. The son of Zeus, the thunder god himself, and the sea nymph Plouto, Tantalus was of an exalted line. For every man blessed with Paradise in the golden, sun drenched Elysian fields, many more were cursed to hideous retribution in the fires of Tartarus. For there existed a delicate balance between the mortal world and the immortal plain, a balance which held bound within it dire consequences for those who sought to violate the laws of nature. The lowliest peasant could be raised to the divine, and the mightiest king could fall to the most humiliating ruin. The struggles between men and gods often bring out the very best, and the very worst in both in the legends of the ancient world.

Consequences by Tantalus