Menelaus

• 1. Introduction

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  "Of moderate stature, auburn-haired, and handsome," with "a pleasing personality": that is how the writer Dares the Phrygian once described Menelaus, a king of Sparta.

  In Greek mythology, that mild portrait belongs to a king whose marriage helped ignite a war that would shape ancient legend for centuries. He was also a husband who would eventually stand face to face again with the wife who left him for another man's city. How does the story explain his rise to Sparta's throne? And what actually happens when he finds her again, once that city finally falls?

• 2. Bloodline and Marriage

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  Menelaus descended from Pelops, son of Tantalus, and grew up as the younger brother of Agamemnon, the future king of Mycenae. In the version followed by Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, their parents were Atreus, king of Mycenae, and Aerope, daughter of the Cretan king Catreus. Another tradition instead makes them sons of Atreus's son Pleisthenes, with the mother named alternately as Aerope, Cleolla, or Eriphyle. In that account, Pleisthenes died young, and Atreus raised the two brothers himself. Agamemnon and Menelaus also had a sister, Anaxibia, also called Astyoche, who married Strophius, son of Crisus.

  Menelaus married Helen of Troy. The Odyssey names only one child from that marriage, a daughter called Hermione, and an illegitimate son, Megapenthes, born to a slave. Other sources mention additional sons. A scholiast on Sophocles's Electra cites Hesiod, recording that after Hermione, Helen also bore Menelaus a son named Nicostratus. A fragment of the Cypria instead credits the couple with a son named Pleisthenes. The mythographer Apollodorus names Megapenthes's mother as a slave called Pieris, an Aetolian, or, according to Acusilaus, Tereis. He adds another illegitimate son, Xenodamas, born to a slave girl named Cnossia. The geographer Pausanias instead makes both Megapenthes and Nicostratus sons of Menelaus by a slave. A scholiast on Book 3, line 175 of the Iliad names two more sons worshipped by the Lacedaemonians, Nicostratus and Aethiolas. The same note records a further son of Helen and Menelaus, Maraphius, ancestor of the Persian Maraphions.

  Those tangled bloodlines say nothing yet about how a Spartan throne ended up in Menelaus's hands.

• 3. A Throne Won by Lot

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  Menelaus's father, Atreus, spent years feuding with his brother Thyestes over the throne of Mycenae. Sources describing this rivalry date from after 5th-century BC Greek tragedy, and the feud featured adultery, incest, and cannibalism. Thyestes finally seized the throne after his own son, Aegisthus, murdered Atreus. Atreus's sons, Menelaus and Agamemnon, fled into exile as a result. They stayed first with King Polypheides of Sicyon, then with King Oeneus of Calydon, before judging the moment right to return. With help from King Tyndareus of Sparta, they drove Thyestes out, and Agamemnon took the Mycenaean throne for himself.

  When Tyndareus's stepdaughter Helen came of age to marry, kings and princes flocked to seek her hand. Among the suitors were Odysseus, Menestheus, Ajax the Great, Patroclus, and Idomeneus, most offering lavish gifts. Tyndareus accepted none of the gifts, but he also refused to turn any suitor away, fearing he would provoke a quarrel. Odysseus offered a solution: he would settle the matter cleanly if Tyndareus backed his own courtship of Tyndareus's niece Penelope, daughter of Icarius. Tyndareus agreed, and Odysseus proposed that every suitor first swear to defend whichever man was chosen as Helen's husband. Straws were drawn, and Menelaus won. Tyndareus, unwilling to slight the powerful Agamemnon, gave him another daughter, Clytaemnestra, to marry instead. Menelaus and Helen married, and he became ruler of Sparta once Tyndareus and Leda stepped down from the throne.

  Archaeologists excavating between 1926 and 1995 at Pellana, in Laconia northwest of Sparta, uncovered a structure some identify as the couple's palace. Other archaeologists argue Pellana sits too far from other Mycenaean centers to have been Menelaus's true capital. Tradition separately credits Menelaus with founding the port city of Menelai Portus, on the coast of Marmarica in North Africa.

  None of that settled kingdom stayed safe once a Trojan prince arrived in Sparta.

• 4. The War for Helen

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  Aphrodite had promised Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, in exchange for a golden apple inscribed "to the fairest." Paris later arrived in Sparta on what was described as a diplomatic mission. During part of that visit, Menelaus was away in Crete, attending the funeral of his maternal grandfather, Catreus. Despite objections from his brother Hector, Paris left for Troy with Helen. Menelaus and Agamemnon then invoked the oath sworn by Helen's former suitors and raised a fleet of a thousand ships. When the Trojans refused to return her, war followed.

  Homer's Iliad supplies the fullest record of Menelaus in battle. In Book 3, Paris challenges him to single combat over Helen, and Menelaus beats him decisively. Before Menelaus can finish him, Aphrodite spirits Paris away inside Troy's walls. In Book 4, the Trojan archer Pandarus, urged on by Athena, shoots Menelaus and wounds him in the abdomen. Athena never intended the arrow to kill him, and she softens the blow enough to save his life. Fighting resumes, and in Book 17, Menelaus fights an extended episode of heroism, hauling Patroclus's corpse clear of the battlefield.

  The writer Hyginus credits Menelaus with killing eight men during the war. Hyginus also lists him among the Greeks hidden inside the Trojan Horse. When Troy finally fell, Menelaus killed Deiphobus, the Trojan who had married Helen after Paris's death.

  What happened next, when Menelaus finally stood before Helen again, depends on which ancient writer tells it.

• 5. The Reunion With Helen

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  In one telling, Menelaus tracks Helen down inside fallen Troy and raises his sword to kill her. His fury dissolves when he sees her weeping and begging at his feet, and he takes her back as his wife.

  A second version has Menelaus resolve to kill her regardless, only for her beauty to disarm him. He drops his sword and leads her to his ship, declaring he will punish her once they reach Sparta.

  The Bibliotheca sets a third scene in front of a temple in Troy's central square. There Menelaus raises his sword again but loses his resolve on seeing Helen tear her clothing in anguish, baring her breasts.

  The poet Stesichorus, in a work called Ilion's Conquest, tells a fourth version. Menelaus hands Helen to his soldiers to be stoned, but when she rips open the front of her robe, the Achaean warriors freeze, stunned by her beauty, and let the stones fall from their hands.

  Whichever version is true, Menelaus and Helen both eventually made it back across the sea to Sparta.

• 6. Life After Troy

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  Book 4 of the Odyssey follows Menelaus's voyage home. Storms drove his fleet off course, first to Crete and then to Egypt, where it sat becalmed and unable to sail. Menelaus and his men trapped the sea god Proteus and forced him to reveal the way home. Later, Odysseus's son Telemachus visited Sparta, and Menelaus recounted this journey to him in person.

  Herodotus offers a wholly different account. In his version, it was not Helen but a phantom who went to Troy, while the real Helen waited out the war in Egypt. There she was reunited with her husband, though contrary winds trapped the couple in Egypt. Menelaus resorted to sacrificing two Egyptian children to secure safe passage home.

  Back in Sparta, Menelaus and Helen appear to live in harmony. He holds no grudge over her flight with a lover, and she freely recounts stories of her time inside besieged Troy. Some scholars read tension beneath that surface. Menelaus counters Helen's tale of loyalty to Greece with a story of his own, where she nearly exposes the hidden soldiers inside the Trojan Horse. He also seems pained that he and Helen never had a son together, even as he favors Megapenthes and Nicostratus, his sons by slave women. In Euripides's play Helen, Menelaus is reunited with Helen after death, on the Isle of the Blessed.

  That happy ending on the page did not stop Greek artists and playwrights from returning to Menelaus's story for centuries.

• 7. Menelaus in Art and Tragedy

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  Greek vase painters depicted Menelaus from the 6th to the 4th centuries BC. Their scenes include his reception of Paris at Sparta, his retrieval of Patroclus's body, and his reunion with Helen.

  He also appears as a character in a cluster of 5th-century BC tragedies: Sophocles's Ajax, and Euripides's Andromache, Helen, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, and The Trojan Women. In tragedy specifically, Menelaus tends to appear less as a member of the doomed House of Atreus and more simply as a hero of the Trojan War.

  Euripides alone returned to Menelaus in five separate plays, keeping the Spartan king in front of Athenian audiences long after his war with Troy had ended.