MENELAUS, king of Sparta, was the brother of Agamemnon {q.v.) and the husband of Helena {q.v.). He was one of the heroes of the Trojan horse, and recovered his wife at the sack of the city. On the voyage homewards his fleet was scattered off Malea by a storm which drove him to Crete; after seven years’ further wandering to Cyprus, Phoenicia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, and the country of the Erembi, he at last had an interview with Proteus and obtained a favourable wind which brought him home on the very day on which Orestes was holding the funeral feast over Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. After a long and happy life in Lacedaemon, Menelaus, as the son-in-law of Zeus, did not die but was translated to Elysium.