Take from the peg the Dorian lute, if in any wise the glory of Pherenikos[2] at Pisa hath swayed thy soul unto glad thoughts, when by the banks of Alpheos he ran, and gave his body ungoaded in the course, and brought victory to his master, the Syracusans’ king, who delighteth in horses.

Bright is his fame in Lydian Pelops’ colony[3], inhabited of a goodly race, whose founder mighty earth-enfolding Poseidon loved, what time from the vessel of purifying[4] Klotho took him with the bright ivory furnishment of his shoulder.

Verily many things are wondrous, and haply tales decked out with cunning fables beyond the truth make false men’s speech concerning them.  For Charis[5], who maketh all sweet things for mortal men, by lending honour unto such maketh oft the unbelievable thing to be believed; but the days that follow after are the wisest witnesses.

Meet is it for a man that concerning gods he speak honourably; for the reproach is less.  Of thee, son of Tantalos, I will speak contrariwise to them who have gone before me, and I will tell how when thy father had bidden thee to that most seemly feast at his beloved Sipylos, repaying to the gods their banquet, then did he of the Bright Trident[6], his heart vanquished by love, snatch thee and bear thee behind his golden steeds to the house of august Zeus in the highest, whither again on a like errand came Ganymede in the after time.

But when thou hadst vanished, and the men who sought thee long brought thee not to thy mother, some one of the envious neighbours said secretly that over water heated to boiling they had hewn asunder with a knife thy limbs, and at the tables had shared among them and eaten sodden fragments of thy flesh.  But to me it is impossible to call one of the blessed gods cannibal; I keep aloof; in telling ill tales is often little gain.

Now if any man ever had honour of the guardians of Olympus, Tantalos was that man; but his high fortune he could not digest, and by excess thereof won him an overwhelming woe, in that the Father hath hung above him a mighty stone that he would fain ward from his head, and therewithal he is fallen from joy.

This hopeless life of endless misery he endureth with other three[7], for that he stole from the immortals and gave to his fellows at a feast the nectar and ambrosia, whereby the gods had made him incorruptible.  But if a man thinketh that in doing aught he shall be hidden from God, he erreth.

Therefore also the immortals sent back again his son to be once more counted with the short-lived race of men.  And he when toward the bloom of his sweet youth the down began to shade his darkening cheek, took counsel with himself speedily to take to him for his wife the noble Hippodameia from her Pisan father’s hand.

And he came and stood upon the margin of the hoary sea, alone in the darkness of the night, and called aloud on the deep-voiced Wielder of the Trident; and he appeared unto him nigh at his foot.