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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Menelaus Biography MENELAUS. In ancient Greek legend, a king of Lacedæmon, the younger brother of Agamemnon and husband of the famous Helen. The abduction of his wife by Paris is represented as the cause of the Trojan War. In the Iliad he appears most prominently in the duel with Paris, when the life of the latter is saved only by the divine interposition of Aphrodite, and in the battle over the body of Patroclus, where he is one of the foremost combatants and eventually carries the corpse from the field. He entered Troy in the wooden horse (Vergil, Æneid, ii, 264). After the capture of Troy he slew Deiphobus, who had wedded Helen after the death of Paris, and in some versions intended to kill Helen also, but was disarmed by her beauty. After the fall of Troy he sailed with Helen for his own land; but his fleet was scattered by a storm, and he wandered for eight years about the coasts of Cyprus, Phnicia; Egypt, and Libya. After his return he lived at Sparta with his wife, Helen, in great happiness; he was translated living to Elysium (Odyssey, iv, 561). Both Menelaus and Helen were worshiped as gods at Therapne, near Sparta, and it is probable that here, as so commonly in Grecian heroic myths, we have two local deities who have been reduced to hero and heroine. Consult the article "Menelaos," in Friedrich Lübker, Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums (8th ed., Leipzig, 1914). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 397. |