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Talk:Tantalus (son of Broteas)

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Zeus as father of Tantalus

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Zeus should also be mentioned as an alternate father of Tantalus as explained in Tantalus.

ICE77 (talk) 05:27, 25 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Our treatment of Tantalus is... a mess at the moment. Currently, we have articles on both Tantalus (son of Broteas) and Tantalus (son of Menelaus). The article on the son of Menelaus is actually about Tantalus (son of Thyestes), which is a redirect to that article. Menelaus is not mentioned in the article about his supposed son; nor indeed is a son called Tantalus mentioned at Menelaus. Both articles claim that their Tantalus was the first husband of Clytemnestra.

As I see it, there are two main possible ways of dealing with this:

  1. Treat the two as separate characters with distinct genealogies, both of whom in some versions are considered to have been the husband of Clytemnestra. In this case, Tantalus (son of Menelaus) should be moved to Tantalus (son of Thyestes).
  2. Treat the two as the same character whose genealogy is different in different sources. In this case, the two articles should be merged (either here, to Tantalus (son of Thyestes), or to some alternate title.

My inclination is that we should consider them the same character with alternate genealogies: DGRBM vol.3 does that (Tantalus (2)); as does John Gilbert, "Clytemnestra's first marriage" in Pedrick and Oberhelman, The soul of tragedy : essays on Athenian drama. Timothy Gantz Early Greek Myth also (pp.549-50) treats all of the stories about Tantalus son of Thyestes and Tantalus son of Broteas together as variations of one another. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:58, 14 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]