Mythic Figure

Menelaus

Μενέλαος

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King of Sparta, Helen’s husband — the wronged host whose grievance became the war.

Younger of the Atreidae, Menelaus received Paris as a guest and lost his wife and treasure to him — the breach of hospitality that all Greece was oath-bound to avenge. Brave without brilliance at Troy, he duels Paris and would have ended the war but for Aphrodite. The Odyssey shows him home again in Sparta with Helen, wealthy, hospitable, faintly melancholy, telling Telemachus of his wanderings by Egypt and of the Old Man of the Sea.

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