2 - The Homeric king of Sparta: Menelaos in a Spartan Mediterranean

Summary

Menelaos, king of Homeric Sparta, was something the Dorian Spartans of the Archaic period could never hope to be: a Peloponnesian and a Spartan even before the Trojan War. He was believed to have descended, through his father, Atreus, from the eponymous Pelops and Hippodamia (and through his mother, Aerope, from either Minos or Lykaon). Thus he stood in sharp contrast to the ’real’ Spartans, who thought of their national history as having begun only with the Return of the Herakleidai. Reaching back to Menelaos through myth and cult was probably for the historical Spartans a response to the challenge both of their national youthfulness and of their relatively brief and recent possession of their country. Reaching back to mythic-historical times could, of course, only go so far. Greek tradition and the Homeric epic were too explicit and too widely disseminated to permit a direct linkage: Menelaos was clearly dissociated in time from the later Spartans. He was neither the founder of the Spartan state nor a progenitor of great Spartan families, nor even the mythical founder of any Spartan colony. Kleomenes’ exceptional contention that he was an Achaean, not a Dorian, was as far as one could possibly go. But Menelaos was no Herakleid either.