Menelaus

The king in the hollow land

Menelaus is king of Lacedaemon. The Odyssey, one of the two epic poems attributed to the poet Homer, puts his palace there, in “the hollow land of Lacedaemon with its many ravines”, and sends Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, to question him. In the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, the muster list of the Greek army before Troy, he leads the men of the Lacedaemonian towns, Sparta and Amyclae among them, in 60 ships, and his force is marshalled apart from his brother Agamemnon’s. Homer attaches three standing epithets to his name, the fixed descriptions a poet repeats whenever he says it: good at the war-cry, fair-haired, and dear to Ares, the god of war.

The duel for Helen

In the third book of the Iliad the fighting stops for a single combat between Menelaus and Paris, the Trojan prince who took Helen out of his house. Menelaus throws first, and his spear goes through the shield without killing the man behind it. He strikes at the helmet with his sword, and the sword shatters in his hand, three pieces or four, and drops. So he takes hold of the helmet itself and starts to drag Paris toward the Greek line. Homer says he would have dragged him away and won glory beyond telling, had Aphrodite, the goddess of love, not been quick to see what was happening. She breaks the chin-strap. The empty helmet comes away in Menelaus’s hand.

The arrow in the belt

The oaths sworn over that duel do not hold. In the fourth book Pandarus, a Trojan archer, shoots at Menelaus across the truce. Athena, the goddess who sides with the Greeks, turns the arrow away from the flesh and guides it into the clasps of his belt, so that the shot grazes him rather than killing him. Agamemnon shudders at the blood, takes his brother by the hand with a heavy moan, and tells him it was for his death, it seems, that he swore the oath over the sacrifice. He reads the shot as the Trojans trampling the oaths they swore there, and therefore as the guarantee that Troy will fall.

Over the body of Patroclus

The seventeenth book gives him a fight he holds. Patroclus, the companion of Achilles, has been killed by the Trojans, and Menelaus comes through the front rank in his bronze and bestrides the body, his spear and his shield held out before him, ready to kill whoever comes for the corpse. Homer compares him to a cow lowing over her first calf, an animal that knew nothing of motherhood until then. A son of Panthous, who says that no Trojan struck Patroclus with the spear before he did, tells Menelaus to give ground and leave the body and the bloody spoils where they lie. Menelaus answers that it is no good thing to boast overweeningly, and reminds him of Hyperenor, his brother, whom Menelaus killed when he made light of him. Neither of them gives way.

What Proteus told him

In the fourth book of the Odyssey, Menelaus repeats to Telemachus what Proteus, a sea god who answers questions only under compulsion, told him on the way home from Troy. Proteus told him two things. The first was his brother’s death. Agamemnon reached home, and Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes, who had set twenty men to lie in wait in the palace, feasted him and then killed him, the way an ox is killed at the stall. The second was his own end, and it was an exemption. Menelaus will not die in Argos. The immortals will carry him to the Elysian plain at the bounds of the earth.

Why he is spared

The Odyssey gives one reason. Menelaus has Helen to wife, and so in the eyes of the gods he is the husband of a daughter of Zeus, the chief of the Greek gods. The poem puts it as a kinship: Menelaus is son-in-law to Zeus. The same marriage is the cause of the war, of the duel Aphrodite ended and of the truce Pandarus broke.

The household at Sparta

When Telemachus reaches the palace, the house is keeping a double marriage feast. Hermione is being sent away to the son of Achilles, a promise Menelaus made while he was at Troy. She is the only child Helen bore him: the Odyssey says the gods granted Helen no further issue after her. The other child in the house is a son, Megapenthes, born to Menelaus by a slave woman, and the bride coming in for him is the daughter of Alector. They feast in a great high-roofed hall, with a minstrel singing to the lyre and two tumblers whirling among them.

The Egyptian version

A different account reached Herodotus, an early Greek historian, from the priests of Egypt. In theirs, Helen never reached Troy at all. Menelaus came up the river to Memphis, told the truth of the matter, was received with great hospitality, and got Helen back unharmed along with his property. Then, held in Egypt by weather he could not sail in, he took two Egyptian children and sacrificed them for a wind. When what he had done became known, he fled with his ships straight for Libya.

Whose son he was

Homer calls him the son of Atreus throughout: “Menelaus, son of Atreus, fostered of Zeus”. The genealogies do not all agree with him. Apollodorus, whose Library collects the family lines of the myths, makes Aerope the wife of Plisthenes, and Plisthenes rather than Atreus the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The two accounts put a generation between them.

The shrine at Therapne

Pausanias, who wrote a traveller’s description of Greece, went up to Therapne and found a temple of Menelaus standing there, with the graves of Menelaus and Helen said to lie inside it. The spur was excavated between 1973 and 1976. The cult is attested earlier than Pausanias. In the fourth century BC, Isocrates, an Athenian writer, says the Spartans of his own day offered sacrifices to Menelaus and Helen at Therapne as gods rather than as heroes.