Penelope, Pandareus, Tantalus, and side tales

If you'd like to go down a Greek mythology rabbit hole today

What’s amazing about Greek mythology? Everything, of course.

But one of the greatest things is its variety. Its multiplicity. There are a lot of freaking stories, y’all!

I’ve been on an Odyssey kick lately, and of course we know all about that story. But embedded within Homer’s poems, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, are what we might call side tales. Scholars call them exempla.

Characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey tell these side tales when they want to get a message across of some type. Today, we might tell a side tale like this:

“You remember that guy who in the news who said he didn’t kill his wife and then got caught? You’re always gonna get caught, sooner or later.
There is no perfect crime.”

Values reinforcement. That’s just one purpose of a side tale. It all depends on who’s telling it and when.

The key is that the stories are myths in themselves. So, a myth within a myth. Mythical characters telling stories as if they’re real Greeks who know about Greek mythology.

So, that side tale from the Odyssey I found? Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, tells it in Book 19 of the Odyssey, and it is astonishing for so many reasons.

So if you’re ready to go down a rabbit hole that leads to the last page (more or less) on the internet, keep reading.

Penelope prays:

O Artemis! Majestic goddess!
Daughter of Zeus! If only you would shoot
an arrow to my heart and kill me now,
or let a gust of wind take hold me
and carry me across the misty clouds
and fling me where the waters of the Ocean
pour forth and back again, as when the breezes
took up the daughters of Pandareus,
after the gods destroyed their parents, leaving
the daughters orphaned. Aphrodite helped them
and gave them honey, cheese, and mellow wine,
and Hera gave them beauty and good sense
above all other women. Artemis
increased their height; Athena taught them how
to to be most skillful in all handiwork.
Then Aphrodite went to Mount Olympus
to ask Zeus, Thunderlord, to grant the girls
good marriages—he knows all things, all fates,
both good and bad. But Harpies seized and forced them
to serve the cruel Furies. May the gods
annihilate me just like them!

(Translation E. Wilson)

There are several astonishing things about this side tale.

Astonishing thing the first: Penelope tells it in a prayer to the goddess Artemis, rather than to someone actually there. She’s alone when she’s telling the tale.

Essentially, she’s telling it to herself, and at the same time, the poet is being very meta and telling the audience. We are listening in to the prayer, so we should be getting a message, too.

Astonishing thing the second: This story, in this version, is only known from the Odyssey. It’s never told in this way anywhere else in Greek mythology.

Astonishing thing the third: The story points to a whole other story about their parents, Pandareus and Harmothoe (Har-moh-THOH-ee). Why did the gods kill them, and why were they so interested in helping the girls after their parents’ deaths?

Astonishing thing the fourth: Why did the gods spend so much time making the daughters of Pandareus so wonderful and attractive, only to have them suffer the terrible fate of serving the Furies?

Then, the strangest thing of all: why is Penelope asking for this type of death?

Hello, rabbit hole.

Let’s start with this: If you’ve read any of my previous posts on Substack, you know my main concern is about the sources of Greek mythology. Where do the stories come from?

So logically the first thing I want to ask (and it’s been asked by scholars as well) is, did the poet just make this story up from whole cloth, to give Penelope a beautiful thing to say when she is so heartbroken over the absence of her husband for twenty years that she wishes for death?

Nope. Scholars say this certainly has to be a story that the ancient audience must have already known about, or they would not be able to identify with Penelope’s sadness. If you’ve never heard a story before, you’re going to focus on the newness of it, not on the content.

Where did it come from, then?

To investigate that, we need to talk about Tantalus, and more answers about the astonishing things will come to light.

Tantalus is one of the notorious sinners of Greek mythology. He is most often known as the person who served up his children in a dish to the immortals, hoping to fool them into eating the wrong thing. He was punished in Tartarus by being constantly unable to eat or drink, though he was cursed with eternal hunger and thirst.

But ancient scholars who read the Penelope side tale share a different and lesser-known story about Tantalus (and Pandareus) that’s relevant here.

Here is the story as told by the late Timothy Gantz (Early Greek Myth, Volume 2):¹

…Zeus’s shrine on Krete possessed a live golden dog, and…the Milesian Pandareus, son of Merops, stole it. Fearing, however, to take the dog back to Miletos, he left it for safekeeping with Tantalus in Phrygia. When Hermes came to look for the dog, Tanalos swore by all the gods that he did not have it, but Hermes found it anyway; Zeus punished Tantalus by placing Mount Sipylos on top of him…Pandareos and his wife Harmothoe first fled to Athens and then to Sicily, where Zeus discovered them and killed them both.

A vase from roughly the same time as the Odyssey, showing the golden dog, Hermes, and Tantalus and Pandareus. The figures on the right are women, maybe the daughters of Pandareus. Image from here.

That’s kind of cool, the theft of a golden dog belonging to Zeus. Sometimes you don’t know why people do silly things like stealing a god’s dog, but whatever.

The implication is that the daughters of Pandareus are punished for their parents’ sins. Despite the gods’ intervention for the daughters, the outrage of the theft and conspiracy with Tantalus bleeds over into the next generation, and the daughters are also doomed.

But what made me sit up and take notice is the names and geography of the story. This is the key to the source of it.

Tantalus and Pandareus are not natives of Greece proper. Miletus, Pandareus’s hometown, is a Greek city on the west coast of Anatolia, modern Turkey. Tantalus lived in Phrygia, which is not Greek at all, and also located in western Anatolia.

Mt. Sipylus, too, is located in western Anatolia.

This area was a hotbed of cultural influence, and according to the redoubtable scholar Mary R. Bachvarova, the place where the Iliad and the Odyssey got their start among poets of various cultures meeting together, comparing notes, composing, and competing to see who could tell the best story.

What’s more, Tantalus has sometimes been identified with the Hittite king name Tudhaliya, from a famous line of monarchs who ruled Anatolia in the Bronze Age.

The curious thing about Hittite kings? They fed the Hittite gods.

In Hittite religion, it was the responsibility of kings to make food sacrifices to the gods—fruit, bread, cheese, wine, meat—in fact, everything that people eat (but especially NOT other people!). The gods didn’t strictly need the food, but if they didn’t get it, they would not bless the people.

So it makes sense, if the name and myth of Tantalus is an echo of a legendary Hittite king, that Tantalus would’ve sinned by offering to the gods a human sacrifice instead of regular food.

Pandareus, for his part, a Greek living in Anatolia, sees himself as a friend to Tantalus, close enough to convince him to be in cahoots with the theft of a golden dog.

That’s cultural influence and cultural exchange right there.

And we haven’t even touched the question of the golden dog living on the island of Crete, which in origin is culturally non-Greek as well.

But back to Penelope.

She tells this story to Artemis, who is often likened to the Mistress of Animals, a multicultural goddess known throughout the Eastern Mediterranean area.

Here is a nice example of a depiction of that goddess, a rich mix of religious and artistic styles:

Image from here.

Does Penelope know all this about the non-Greek sources of her religion and story? She seems not to be aware of that at all. But she knows that this is a famous tale. She knows enough to tell it. This story has come to her from somewhere else.

The force of the side tale for her seems to be that she is like the daughters of Pandareus. She started out as a bride seemingly charmed by the gods, but a happy life was not to be.

We, the audience, want to yell out to her, “No, no, Penelope! Your happy ending is coming! You are not like the daughters of Pandareus. You don’t have an ancestral curse following you! Odysseus is right there with you and is going to make sure you don’t get married to one of those worthless suitors! The gods are going to be good to you after all.”

It’s true. Sometimes when we are in the depths of our grief, we make connections that are unwarranted, worse than what is actually happening.

This is often called catastrophizing. It is strangely comforting to imagine the worst, to give yourself up to the worst outcome, to spiral down into the depths because hope is just too painful to bear anymore.

I am very good at catastrophizing, and apparently, so is Penelope.

So when Penelope tells herself through the prayer that all is lost, she is really giving herself a message: things are so bad I’m going to comfort myself with the thought of how bad they are. That’s the purpose of this side tale for her.

And for us, the audience? Life is hard, sure, but sometimes something good is going to happen. Penelope knows this, and later on, will help Odysseus reclaim his house and reunite with him.

That’s probably enough for now, but there’s plenty more to talk about with this particular rabbit hole. If you’ve read this far, I commend you. Let me know how you liked it and if you have any questions.

1. This book is a great resource for anyone interested in finding out what we know about the history of Greek myths; that is, what stories we know, in what works of literature they are first told (that’s where the “Early” comes in), and who then retells the stories later and what changes are made from the earliest versions.