Menelaus

Menelaus, a son of Atreus and younger brother of Agamemnon, ruled Sparta as king after marrying Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman alive and a daughter of Zeus. When the Trojan prince Paris, guided there by the outcome of the Judgement of Paris, arrived in Sparta as a guest, Menelaus welcomed him for nine days before leaving for Crete to attend his grandfather Catreus's funeral. In his absence, Paris persuaded Helen to leave with him for Troy, taking a share of the household's wealth and abandoning her nine-year-old daughter Hermione. Menelaus returned to an empty palace, and the loss became the occasion for a vast Greek coalition, led by Agamemnon, to sail against Troy and reclaim her. In Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon says his brother Menelaus persuaded him to sacrifice Iphigenia when the fleet lay weatherbound at Aulis.

In Homer's Iliad, Menelaus fights among the Greek champions throughout the war's tenth year and very nearly ends the whole conflict himself in Book 3, when he and Paris agree to settle the war by single combat for Helen's sake. Menelaus overpowers Paris quickly, breaking his sword on his opponent's helmet and dragging him by the helmet strap toward the Greek lines, only for Aphrodite to snap the strap and spirit Paris away in a mist before the killing blow can land. The truce collapses soon after, when the Trojan archer Pandarus wounds Menelaus with an arrow and restarts the war in earnest.

Menelaus is one of the few prominent Greek commanders who survives the war outright and eventually gets home. Homer's Odyssey has him tell Telemachus, Odysseus's son, about his own eight-year detour through Egypt and Cyprus on the long nostos back to Sparta, including a wrestling match with the shape-shifting sea god Proteus to learn his fate. Proteus tells him he will not die an ordinary death at all: because he is married to Helen and counted a son-in-law of Zeus, the gods will carry him living to the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth, where life is easiest for mortals. Later tragedy, especially Euripides's Helen, keeps the couple together at Sparta in old age; this entry follows Homer's own account of the couple's return and the Elysium prophecy rather than the later dramatic elaborations, since no ancient source actually narrates Menelaus dying.