Opposed to Elysion or the Islands of the Blessed is Tartaros, as it is usually called (though Homer does not so name it), the place of punishment of the wicked. Those who suffer there are not all sinners, or even all great sinners, but simply certain persons who have directly offended of insulted the gods. Odysseus sees there the following:
Firstly, Tityos the giant, who is bound fast and cannot keep off two vultures who tear, one on either side, at his liver. His offence was that he tried to rape Leto, for which her son Apollo slew him.
Next is Tantalos, who is everlastingly hungry and thirsty. He stands in a pool of water which plashes against his chin, but always vanishes when he tries to drink it; overhead hang all manner of fruit-trees, which are always tossed out of his reach by a wind when he tries to gather their fruit. His sin was, that he tested the omniscience of the gods by serving them at a banquet with the flesh of his own son Pelops, to see if they could tell it from that of some beast; or in the hope that, like Orion’s father, he might be rewarded by the gods for the singular sacrifice of his son to their feasting with an equally singular gift from them in return: namely the gods’ conferral upon Pelops not only of renewed life, but also the enjoyment of immortality. Demeter, distraught with grief for the loss of Persephone, ate part of one shoulder, but the rest of the banquetters discovered the cheat, and Pelops was brought to life again and the missing part replaced by a shoulder of ivory, which alone remained immortal.
Another variety of Tantalos’ story tells that he was plagued with eternal fear, with or without hunger; a rock continually hangs over his head and seems just about to fall and crush him. His sin also is variously reported, for in various forms of the story he did not tempt the gods, but (a) stole their nectar and ambrosia and gave them to his friends; or (b) he blabbed their secrets; or (c) he asked for a life like theirs (surely another version of the stealing of the food of immortality); or (d) when Pandareos stole a golden dog from the shrine of Zeus, Tantalos concealed the stolen goods and swore to Hermes that he knew nothing of the matter. Or finally—and these are clearly late versions—(e) it was he, not Zeus, who kidnapped Ganymedes, or (f) he anticipated the physicists of later times by denying that the Sun was a god, declaring that it was nothing but a mass of fiery matter of some kind.
Except this last bit of silliness, all these stories agree on the essential point; Tantalos was admitted to the friendship of the gods and somehow abused his privileges. His punishment became proverbial in antiquity, although the verb ‘to tantalize,’ in the sense in which we use it, seems not to be ancient; it is found indeed in one or two passages, but in a quite different meaning. He was equally proverbial for his wealth, a use of his legend which is no longer familiar, Kroisos having quite ousted him, as indeed he had begun to do in ancient times.
Third in Odysseus’ list of those whom he saw ‘suffering great anguish’ was Sisyphos. He was condemned eternally to roll a great stone up a hill; every time he reached the top with his burden, it slipped from him and rolled down again. This, with insignificant variations, is the one form of his punishment, as given by authors of all dates. For his sin, read the file about Sisyphos.
It is noteworthy that, save perhaps for Tityos (the liver was anciently thought to be the seat of the desires, so that it might be possible, even in so early a source as Homer, to think of him as suffering in that part wherewith he lusted against Leto), none of the sinners is tormented in a way reminiscent of his sin; a sharp contrast to other and to later visions of Hell, upon which much ingenuity has spent to make the punishment fit the crime. Hence a good deal of rather useless effort has been made by modern writers to find why each of the tormented sinners meets his particular fate. Thus, Sisyphos has been taken as representing all manner of things, from the futility of human endeavour to the ceaseless action of the waves against the rocks of his native region, the Isthmus of Corinth. Perhaps the least wildly impossible suggestion is that the story arises from some very old representation in art of the hero rolling a huge block of stone to build the fortifications of the Akrokorinthos, traditionally attributed to him. In like manner, various guesses have been made at the why and wherefore of Tantalos’ misery, but without any verifiable results.
Hardly less famous than the Homeric sinners is Ixion. He also was a direct offender against the gods, having tried to seduce Hera. For this violation of divine hospitality, he was bound to a wheel which eternally revolves.
Frustrated endeavour is also the punishment of the Danaids. For slaying their husbands, they must eternally try to fill a large water-jar; but it has no bottom, or their pitchers are broken, so that their efforts are always in vain, for the water flows away as fast as they pour it in. It is a not improbable explanation that they are trying unavailingly to provide themselves with a bath, either the lustral bath of the bride, or one intended to form part of a ceremony of purification from the sin of blood-shedding.
A sort of comic parallel to them is the figure of Oknos. He eternally plaits a straw rope, which his ass eternally eats. One may doubt whether he was originally supposed to be a punished sinner in Hell at all; the tale reads rather like a droll pure and simple, a part of the rich literature dealing with the doings of fools.