Character
Menelaus
King of Sparta · husband of Helen
King of Sparta, husband of Helen, and the man the Trojan War was fought for. Telemachus finds him rich, hospitable and sad, still grieving comrades who never came home. He is the one who finally supplies the news that Odysseus is alive — wrung from the shape-shifting sea-god Proteus, whom Menelaus had to wrestle through every form he took while hiding under sealskins on an Egyptian beach.
He is rich, hospitable and quietly wretched — the poem's portrait of a man who won the war and cannot stop counting the cost.