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.

After a back-and-forth struggle that featured adultery, incest, and cannibalism, Thyestes gained the throne after his son Aegisthus murdered Atreus.

Tyndareus readily agreed, and Odysseus proposed that, before the decision was made, all the suitors should swear a most solemn oath to defend the chosen husband in any quarrel.

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.

[17] 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.

Later, in Book 17, Homer gives Menelaus an extended aristeia as the hero retrieves the corpse of Patroclus from the battlefield.

As happened to many Greeks, Menelaus's homebound fleet was blown by storms to Crete and Egypt where they were becalmed, unable to sail away.

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.

[21] Menelaus appears as a character in a number of 5th-century Greek tragedies: Sophocles's Ajax, and Euripides's Andromache, Helen, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, and The Trojan Women.