Menelaus

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For other uses, see Menelaus (disambiguation).
Menelaus
King of Sparta
Member of the Achaeans
Menelaus
Marble bust of Menelaus, Vatican Museums
Personal information
ParentsAtreus and Aerope
SiblingsAgamemnon
ConsortHelen
OffspringHermione, Nicostratus, Megapenthes, Pleisthenes

In

Ancient Greek μένος (menos) 'vigor, rage, power', and λαός (laos) 'people') was a Greek king of Mycenaean (pre-Dorian) Sparta. According to the Iliad, the Trojan war began as a result of Menelaus’s wife, Helen, fleeing to Troy with the Trojan prince Paris. The cuckolded Menelaus was a central figure in the Trojan War, leading the Spartan contingent of the Greek army, under his elder brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Prominent in both the Iliad and Odyssey, Menelaus was also popular in Greek vase painting and Greek tragedy, the latter more as a hero of the Trojan War than as a member of the doomed House of Atreus
.

Description

Menelaus captures Helen in Troy, detail of fresco in Pompeii

In the account of Dares the Phrygian, Menelaus was described as ". . .of moderate stature, auburn-haired, and handsome. He had a pleasing personality."[2]

Family

Menelaus was a descendant of

Cretan king Catreus.[4] However, according to another tradition, Agamemnon and Menelaus were the sons of Atreus' son Pleisthenes, with their mother being Aerope, Cleolla, or Eriphyle. According to this tradition Pleisthenes died young, with Agamemnon and Menelaus being raised by Atreus.[5] Agamemnon and Menelaus had a sister Anaxibia (or Astyoche) who married Strophius, the son of Crisus.[6]

According to the Odyssey, Menelaus had only one child by Helen, a daughter

Lacedaemonians and another son of Helen by Menelaus, Maraphius, from whom descended the Persian Maraphions.[12]

Mythology

Ascension and reign

Although early authors, such as Aeschylus refer in passing to Menelaus' early life, detailed sources are quite late, post-dating 5th-century BC Greek tragedy.[13] According to these sources, Menelaus' father, Atreus, had been feuding with his brother Thyestes over the throne of Mycenae. After a back-and-forth struggle that featured adultery, incest, and cannibalism, Thyestes gained the throne after his son Aegisthus murdered Atreus. As a result, Atreus' sons, Menelaus and Agamemnon, went into exile. They first stayed with King Polypheides of Sicyon, and later with King Oeneus of Calydon. But when they thought the time was ripe to dethrone Mycenae's hostile ruler, they returned. Assisted by King Tyndareus of Sparta, they drove Thyestes away, and Agamemnon took the throne for himself.

When it was time for

Clytaemnestra).[14] The rest of the suitors swore their oaths, and Helen and Menelaus were married, Menelaus becoming a ruler of Sparta with Helen after Tyndareus and Leda
abdicated the thrones.

Their supposed palace (ἀνάκτορον) has been discovered (the excavations started in 1926 and continued until 1995) in Pellana, Laconia, to the north-west of modern (and classical) Sparta.[15] Other archaeologists consider that Pellana is too far away from other Mycenaean centres to have been the "capital of Menelaus".[16]

According to tradition Menelaus founded the port-city Menelai Portus on the coast of Marmarica in Northern Africa.[17]

Regnal titles
Preceded by
Tyndareus
(second reign)
 King of Sparta Succeeded by

Trojan War

Main article: Trojan War
Menelaus regains Helen, detail of an Attic red-figure crater, c. 450–440 BC, found in Gnatia (now Egnazia, Italy).

According to legend, in return for awarding her a golden apple inscribed "to the fairest," Aphrodite promised Paris the most beautiful woman in all the world. After concluding a diplomatic mission to Sparta during the latter part of which Menelaus was absent to attend the funeral of his maternal grandfather Catreus in Crete, Paris ran off to Troy with Helen despite his brother Hector's prohibition. Invoking the oath of Tyndareus, Menelaus and Agamemnon raised a fleet of a thousand ships and went to Troy to secure Helen's return; the Trojans refused, providing a casus belli for the Trojan War.

Homer's Iliad is the most comprehensive source for Menelaus's exploits during the Trojan War. In Book 3, Menelaus challenges Paris to a duel for Helen's return. Menelaus soundly beats Paris, but before he can kill him and claim victory, Aphrodite spirits Paris away inside the walls of Troy. In Book 4, while the Greeks and Trojans squabble over the duel's winner, Athena inspires the Trojan Pandarus to shoot Menelaus with his bow and arrow. However, Athena never intended for Menelaus to die and she protects him from the arrow of Pandarus.[18] Menelaus is wounded in the abdomen, and the fighting resumes. Later, in Book 17, Homer gives Menelaus an extended aristeia as the hero retrieves the corpse of Patroclus from the battlefield.

According to

Hyginus, Menelaus killed eight men in the war, and was one of the Greeks hidden inside the Trojan Horse. During the sack of Troy, Menelaus killed Deiphobus
, who had married Helen after the death of Paris.

There are four versions of Menelaus' and Helen's reunion on the night of the sack of Troy:

After the war

Menelaus and Meriones lifting Patroclus' corpse on a cart while Odysseus looks on; alabaster urn, Etruscan artwork from Volterra, 2nd century BC

Book 4 of the Odyssey provides an account of Menelaus' return from Troy and his homelife in Sparta. When visited by Odysseus' son Telemachus, Menelaus recounts his voyage home. As happened to many Greeks, Menelaus' homebound fleet was blown by storms to Crete and Egypt where they were becalmed, unable to sail away. They trapped Proteus and forced him to reveal how to make the voyage home. Once back in Sparta, he and Helen are shown to be reconciled and have a harmonious married life—he holding no grudge at her having run away with a lover and she feeling no restraint in telling anecdotes of her life inside besieged Troy. Menelaus does seem to be pained that he and Helen have no male heir, and is shown to be fond of Megapenthes and Nicostratus, his sons by slave women. According to Euripides' Helen, Menelaus is reunited with Helen after death, on the Isle of the Blessed.[20]

In vase painting

Menelaus appears in Greek vase painting in the 6th to 4th centuries BC, such as: Menelaus's reception of Paris at Sparta; his retrieval of Patroclus's corpse; and his reunion with Helen.[21]

In Greek tragedy

Menelaus appears as a character in a number of 5th-century Greek tragedies:

Iphigenia at Aulis, and The Trojan Women
.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Grimal, s.v. Menelaus.
  2. ^ Dares Phrygius, History of the Fall of Troy 13
  3. ^ For a discussion of the house of Tantalus see Gantz, pp. 531–556. For Menelaus' genealogy see, Grimal, p. 526, Table 2, and p. 534, Table 13.
  4. Tzetzes' Exegesis in Iliadem 1.122 (citing "Homer" = Hesiod Catalogue of Women fr. 137c Most). They are also the sons of Atreus, in the Iliad and Odyssey, see for example Iliad 11.131, Odyssey 4.462, although Aerope is not mentioned (see Gantz, p. 522). See also Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 4–5, (Atreus as father, no mention of mother); Hesiod Catalogue of Women fr. 138 Most [= fr. 195 MW], and Sophocles, Ajax 1295–1297
    (Aerope as mother, no mention of father).
  5. Tzetzes, Exegesis in Iliadem 1.122 (citing "Hesiod, Aeschylus, and some others" = Hesiod Catalogue of Women fr. 137b Most). For Eriphyle see Gantz, p. 553 (citing Scholia on Euripides Orestes
    4).
  6. Fabulae 117
    .
  7. ^ Hard, p. 441; Fowler, p. 529; Frazer's note 1 to Apollodorus 3.11.1; Homer, Odyssey 4.11–14. See also Homer, Iliad 3.175; Sophocles, Electra 539. For a genealogical table containing children of Menelaus, see Grimal, p. 534, Table 13.
  8. Cinaethon, fr. 3 [= Porphyry
    ap. schol. (D) Iliad 3.175], which seems to understand Nicostratus as being the son of Helen and Menelaus, see Gantz. According to Frazer, the scholiast on Iliad 3.175 mentions Nicostratus as a son of Helen (see also Gantz, p. 573).
  9. ^ Collar and Cropp 2008b, p. 79 n. 1; Gantz, pp. 322 (which says that "the implication of our scholiast source is that this child was in lieu of Nikostratos"), 573 (which says this Pleisthenes "seems nowhere else mentioned").
  10. Cnossos on Crete. Such ethnics were a common way of naming slaves, see Fowler, p. 529
    .
  11. ^ Pausanias, 2.18.6, 3.19.9. Fowler, p. 529, notes that the name 'Tereis' is unique and possibly "corrupt".
  12. ^ Frazer's note 1 to Apollodorus 3.11.1, see also Grimal, s.v. Menelaus; Gantz, p. 573.
  13. Hyginus' Fabulae and the Epitome of the Bibliotheca
    .
  14. ^ "Τρωικοσ Πολεμοσ - Ελληνικη Μυθολογια Και Πολιτισμοσ". Archived from the original on 2011-10-01. Retrieved 2011-10-05.
  15. ^ admin. "Διαβλητικός".
  16. ^ Mee & Spawforth (2001), p. 229
  17. ^ Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1898), Menelai Portus
  18. ISBN 9780226470498
    .
  19. ^ Andromache, 629–31.
  20. ^ Line 1675.
  21. ^ Woodford 1993.

References

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Menelaus".
  • Media related to Menelaus at Wikimedia Commons
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