Plouto- Greek SpiritSpirit · Nymph

Mother of Tantalus

Hesiod names Plouto among the Oceanids, daughters of Oceanus and Tethys, and her name comes from ploutos, wealth. Zeus lay with her, and she bore Tantalus, who became king of Sipylus in Lydia.

The gods admitted Tantalus to their own feasts on Olympus. He repaid them with crimes. He stole nectar and ambrosia from the divine table and gave them to mortals. Then he slaughtered his own son Pelops, butchered the boy, and served his flesh to the gods at a banquet, testing whether they could tell human meat from animal. Only Demeter, distracted by her grief for Persephone, ate a piece — the boy's shoulder. The rest of the gods recognized what lay on their plates. They condemned Tantalus to stand forever in a pool of water that receded when he bent to drink, beneath branches of fruit that pulled away when he reached to eat.

The Curse That Descends

The gods restored Pelops to life, fitting him with a new shoulder carved from ivory to replace the one Demeter had eaten. Pelops left Lydia and won the hand of Hippodamia by defeating her father King Oenomaus in a chariot race. Oenomaus had killed every previous suitor, nailing their heads above his gate. Some say Pelops won through sabotage, bribing the king's charioteer to replace the bronze linchpins with wax. The violence Tantalus had set loose did not end with his punishment. Pelops's sons Atreus and Thyestes turned on each other, and Atreus served Thyestes the flesh of Thyestes's own children at a feast — the same act their grandfather had committed against the gods, now turned inward on the family. Atreus's son Agamemnon led the Greeks to Troy and returned home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. The bloodshed ran for generations before Orestes's trial at Athens brought it to an end.