In Greek mythology, Menelaus 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. 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.
Appearance List Iliad (c. 8th century BCE) by Homer; Odyssey (c. 8th century BCE) by Homer; Cypria (archaic, fragments); Little Iliad (archaic, fragments); Helen (4th c. BCE) by Isocrates — Defense and reinterpretation of Helen’s role; Helen (5th c. BCE) by Gorgias; Helen (412 BCE) by Euripides — Radical variant; Iphigenia at Aulis (late 5th c. BCE); Orestes (408 BCE); Heroides (c. 1st century BCE) by Ovid; Aeneid (c. 29–19 BCE) by Virgil — retrospective Roman framing of Trojan War, Helen appears in Book II; Bibliotheca (1st–2nd c. CE) — prose account of Helen, Menelaus, and Trojan War cycle; Description of Greece (2nd c. CE); Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1308–1320); Recueil des histoires de Troie (c. 1464); Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1602); The Story of Greece: Told to Boys and Girls by Mary Macgregor (c. 1910s) [Internet Archive]; The Age of Fable (1855; many later eds.) by Thomas Bulfinch; Myths of the Greeks and Romans (1893) by H. A. Guerber; The Myths of Greece and Rome (1942) by Edith Hamilton; The Greek Myths (1955) by Robert Graves. Film: Helen of Troy (1956) dir. Robert Wise.
Sample Read Bulfinch’s Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch [Internet Archive]
Description In Greek mythology, Menelaus 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. 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.
