With the ongoing success of Christopher Nolan’s epic movie The Odyssey, Greek mythology is all over popular culture news right now—a wonderful reminder of how rich and vibrant these ancient tales can be.

Many expressions from Greek myths have made their way into everyday English language and continue to be used to this day. If you’ve ever talked about an “Achilles heel” or someone possessing the “Midas touch,” then you’ve been referencing tales thousands of years old. Phrases aside, Greek words play a large part in modern English vocabulary, with many thousands of commonly used words tracing their origins back to that place.

“Democracy,” “melancholy,” “music,” “phobia,” “sycophant,” “planet,” and numerous others all stem from the Greek language. So too does the word “tantalize.”

Meet Tantalus

Merriam-Webster defines tantalize as meaning: “to tease or torment by or as if by presenting something desirable to the view but continually keeping it out of reach.” To understand the word’s history, we need to look to the Greek mythological figure Tantalus, who was said to be a king, the ruler of Sipylus, in modern Turkey.

In some versions of the story, Tantalus was a son of Zeus, king of the gods, and married to the daughter of the god, Atlas, whose name was Dione. Tantalus numbered among the very first generation of humans at a time when gods and mortals frequently intermingled. He is described as rich, arrogant, and inquisitive.

There are a few different accounts of how Tantalus came to earn the ire of the gods, but all of them centre around a feast at the home of the gods, Mount Olympus, to which Tantalus was invited. In the versions kinder to the mortal king, his crime was merely rudeness or bad behavior in the presence of his creators. Some have him attempting to steal ambrosia, the nectar of the gods. Others go so far as to relate that Tantalus, seeking to test divine omnipotence, murdered his own son, chopped him up, cooked him, and then served said meat before the immortals.

The Sentence That Gave Us the Word

Whatever crime he committed, all of the stories have Tantalus being sent to Tartarus—the underworld where souls are judged and receive their eternal punishment.

Tantalus’s sentence was particularly cruel. Starving and thirsty, he was made to stand in water beneath the boughs of a fruit tree. Whenever he stooped to drink, the water would decrease and flow away. If he reached up to grab fruit, the branches would rise up to a point just out of the unfortunate king’s grasp. Hence the modern meaning of the word tantalize.