Menelaus
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Menelaus. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in Greek legend, one of the Greek heroes, a King of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon, and the unfortunate husband of the lovely but faithless Helen, whose flight with Paris, the youthful envoy from Priam, led to the Trojan war. In the "Iliad" he fights a duel with Paris and does many brave deeds, including the bearing of the body of Patroclus from the battlefield. In the 10th year of the Trojan war, Helen, by perfidiously introducing Menelaus into the chamber of Deiphobus, obtained his forgiveness and she returned with him to Sparta, after a voyage of eight years. He died some time after his return.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
in Greek legend, the king of Sparta. He was the brother of Agamemnon and the husband of Helen whose abduction brought about the Trojan War. Menelaus summoned his friends and allies to his support in a siege of Troy which lasted ten years. While the object of the war was attained, and Menelaus recovered his wife, he is by no means the heroic personage of the legend. His return occupied eight years of wandering. See Achilles ; Ulysses ; Helen ; Priam ; Troy , etc.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
A king of Sparta , brother to Agamemnon . He married Helen, the most beautiful woman of her time. Paris, having arrived in Sparta in the absence of Menelaus, persuaded her to elope with him, which was the cause of the Trojan war. In the tenth year of the war Helen, it is said, obtained the forgiveness of Menelaus, with whom she returned to Sparta, where, shortly after his return, he died.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Menelaus is a figure of legend, and the outline given by Collier's in 1921 is still the one told today. The chief shifts are in emphasis rather than fact: modern readers are pointed to the Odyssey's own ending for Menelaus, where Proteus foretells that he will not die at all but be carried to the Elysian plain as Zeus's son-in-law, which sits oddly with the 1900 volume's flat statement that "shortly after his return, he died". Excavation has also given him an address of sorts: the Menelaion, a hilltop shrine to Menelaus and Helen at Therapne above Sparta, was dug by the British School at Athens in the 1970s and produced votive dedications to the pair from the seventh century BC, beside the remains of a Bronze Age mansion. And where these entries say Paris "persuaded" or "abducted" Helen, scholarship since the 1970s has treated her agency as the interesting question rather than a detail to be settled in a clause.
Written for this edition, 2026.