Menelaus

Also known as: MEN. / MENELAUS / Menelaos / Menelaüs · Family: House of Atreus · Role: king of Sparta · First appears: Aeschylus, Agamemnon — Scene 1

Menelaus is the son of Atreus and Aerope, brother of Agamemnon, and king of Sparta. Helen chose him as her husband, but while he was away Paris carried her from him to Troy, “being received by him as a guest, he enticed his wife Helena to leave her lord and go with him to Troïa.” Calchas foretold that the Atreid army would sack Troy, and the Greeks chose Agamemnon as their general because he was Menelaus’s brother. During the war, Menelaus vanished from the Achaean host with his ship; he was an enemy of Paris and Aias, and later opposed Teucer over Aias’s burial, ordering that Aias remain unburied and threatening to prevent the funeral by force: “No more, but this. No burial for this man!”

At Aulis, Menelaus broke Agamemnon’s seal and exposed his concealed letter concerning Iphigenia’s sacrifice, but then changed his position. Pitying his brother’s distress, he urged him neither to kill Iphigenia nor to act on Menelaus’s behalf, and the brothers reconciled. After Troy’s fall, the Greek troops placed Helen in his power; Menelaus declared that she should be slain for the wrong she had caused and ordered her taken to the ships, though in another account he returned with her to Sparta.

After a shipwreck, Menelaus reached Egypt stripped of his royal clothing and concealed Helen and his surviving companions in a cave. Theonoe revealed that he was alive, and he and Helen recognized one another after the phantom Helen vanished; “O happy day Which gives thee to my arms!” With Helen and Theonoe, he concealed his survival from Theoclymenus, consented to be called dead, seized a ship, defeated its sailors, and sailed with Helen toward Greece under the guidance of Castor and Pollux.

Later, in Argos, Menelaus refused Orestes’s request for protection, but Apollo ordered him to let Orestes reign over Argos and to betroth Hermione to him, while Menelaus departed to rule Sparta as Helen’s dowry. In Phthia, he brought Molossus secretly from the shrine, sentenced Andromache and Molossus to death, and seized Andromache from Peleus with the intention of killing her; Peleus defeated him, and Menelaus fled, leaving Hermione behind.