Menelaus Εὐρυβίης‎

This concluding chapter examines Simonides’ ‘Plataea Elegy’. Sometime not long after the Greek defeat of the Persian army at Plataea, Simonides composed an elegy to commemorate this world-historical event in ostentatiously epic terms. Menelaus makes an appearance in the elegy, with the Dioscuri, as patron of the Spartan contingent. The intriguing poem provides a final glimpse of Menelaus as the archaic period draws to a close. It suggests that Menelaus’ place in the cultic environment of archaic Sparta was matched by a significant role in Spartans’ self-definition. The chapter then assesses Simonides’ description of Menelaus as εὐρυβίης‎. Simonides seems to have been the first to adapt the epithet εὐρυβίης‎ to describe a hero. Public performance of the elegy would have provided the opportunity for quick and widespread dissemination of the newly re-discovered word. Its special use then became normative in the lyric diction of epinician poets in the early to mid-fifth century.