Menelaus

King of Sparta and husband of Helen — younger son of Atreus, brother of Agamemnon. When Paris stole his wife under the protection of guest-friendship he invoked the oath of the suitors of Helen (the *Oath of Tyndareus*, by which every man who had courted her had sworn to defend her chosen husband) and assembled the Achaean coalition against Troy. In *Iliad* 3 he duels Paris before the armies and would have killed him but for Aphrodite's intervention. In *Odyssey* 4 Telemachus visits him in Sparta, where Menelaus narrates his own long return through Egypt — wrestling the Old Man of the Sea Proteus for sailing-instructions — and gossips genially with the recovered Helen.

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