The Odyssey

This chapter examines the portrayal of Menelaus in the Odyssey. The Odyssey-poet has a new role for Menelaus to play: Menelaus will help Telemachus to find, and the audience to understand, Odysseus. The chapter also reveals the importance of relationships in Homeric character-portrayal. In the Iliad, Homer refigures the relationships by which Menelaus was traditionally construed. He consistently defers to Agamemnon not out of inferiority or dependency but acts out of affection and choice. Helen matters very little to Menelaus, apart from the injustice of her abduction. The Odyssey-poet thematizes these same relationships rather differently. As the narrative begins, the returns of Menelaus and Agamemnon depend on one another. But as the story progresses, Menelaus distances himself, for a time, from brother and wife. Menelaus extricates himself from Helen in the course of his narrative, eliminating her altogether in the story of Proteus and casting himself as a hero of Odyssean mettle, with a fate all his own. The relationships by which Menelaus traditionally is construed begin to close in on him after the close of the Proteus narrative. Homer finally leaves Menelaus behind, in the shadow of Helen, when Telemachus returns to Ithaca.