In Greek mythology, Menelaus was king of Sparta and younger brother of Agamemnon. Husband of Helen, he led the Spartan contingent in the Trojan War after Paris took her to Troy. Prominent in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, he duels Paris, retrieves Patroclus's corpse, recovers Helen at the sack, and after a stormy nostos through Egypt returns to a prosperous Spartan household. He appears widely in Greek vase painting and tragedy.
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I.Family and accession
Menelaus was a descendant of Pelops. Homer makes him and Agamemnon sons of Atreus and Aerope; another tradition makes them sons of Pleisthenes, raised by Atreus. Their sister Anaxibia (or Astyoche) married Strophius. After Atreus's murder and Thyestes' usurpation, the brothers took refuge with Tyndareus of Sparta, then with his help recovered Mycenae for Agamemnon.
When Helen's many suitors competed for her hand, Odysseus advised Tyndareus to bind them all by oath to defend the chosen husband. Menelaus won Helen; Tyndareus later abdicated, and Menelaus and Helen ruled Sparta. By Helen he had a daughter Hermione; Homer also names an illegitimate son Megapenthes by a slave. Other sources add Nicostratus, Pleisthenes, Aethiolas and others, sometimes by Helen and sometimes by slave women.
II.Trojan War
While Menelaus attended the funeral of his grandfather Catreus in Crete, Paris — promised Helen by Aphrodite after the Judgment of Paris — carried her off to Troy. Invoking the Oath of Tyndareus, Menelaus and Agamemnon raised the Greek fleet.
In Iliad Book 3 Paris challenges Menelaus to a duel for Helen; Menelaus is winning when Aphrodite spirits Paris away. In Book 4 Athena prompts Pandarus to wound Menelaus with an arrow, breaking the truce. In Book 17 Menelaus has an extended aristeia recovering Patroclus's body. Hyginus counts eight men slain by him; he was among those inside the Wooden Horse. At the sack he killed Deiphobus, who had married Helen after Paris's death.
Accounts of his reunion with Helen vary: he raises his sword to kill her for adultery, then drops it when moved by her tears or beauty; in Stesichorus the Achaeans nearly stone her until her beauty stays their hands.
III.Return and later tradition
Odyssey Book 4 has Menelaus tell Telemachus of a nostos blown to Crete and Egypt, where he trapped the shape-shifting Proteus to learn how to sail home. Herodotus preserves a version in which only a phantom Helen went to Troy while the real Helen waited in Egypt. Once restored at Sparta, the couple appear outwardly harmonious, though some readers sense lasting tension. Euripides's Helen assigns Menelaus an afterlife on the Isle of the Blessed.
He is a character in Sophocles's Ajax and in several Euripidean plays (Andromache, Helen, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, Trojan Women), and a frequent subject of Archaic and Classical vase painting — receiving Paris at Sparta, recovering Patroclus, reuniting with Helen.