The original tantalizing was not a teaser trailer. It was an eternity of hunger and thirst, designed by the gods for one man.
Tantalus was a king of Phrygia, in Asia Minor, and a son of Zeus. He was famous for his wealth and close to the gods. Then he abused that closeness. The ancient sources cannot agree on how. Pindar says he stole nectar and ambrosia and shared them with his friends. Diodorus says he leaked the gods' private conversations to mortals. The darkest version says he killed and cooked his son Pelops and served him to the gods, a story Pindar himself rejects as a lie.
The punishment is better attested than the crime. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus sees Tantalus in the underworld, standing in water up to his chin under a fruit tree. When he reaches for the fruit, the wind lifts the branches away. When he bends to drink, the water drains off. Many early sources add a huge rock hanging over his head, which was actually the more common version at first.
His name may itself have been read as a description. Plato, in the Cratylus, connected it to talantatos, "one who has to bear much." Modern scholars have other ideas, none of them settled. The classicist M. L. West suggested a link to Hantili, a name borne by Hittite kings.
English turned the king into a verb in the 1590s by adding -ize to the Latin form, Tantalus. To tantalize is to tease someone with something they want while keeping it out of reach. British writers often spell it tantalise, while American English has always preferred the -ize spelling.
The myth also reached the periodic table. In 1802 the Swedish chemist Anders Ekeberg named a new metal tantalum. In his words, it alluded to the metal's "inability to, in the midst of an excess of acid, absorb any of it." The metal sits in acid and cannot drink, just like the king in his pool.