Four Last Songs (Vaughan Williams) song of the cycle "Menelaus." The character Menelaus appears both in Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey". Menelaus is the King of Sparta whose wife, Helen, was taken from him by Paris to Troy. Together with his brother Agamemnon, fellow ruler Odysseus, and other warriors, Menelaus launched the Trojan War to regain his wife and return her to Sparta. In "The Odyssey", Odysseus' son Telemachus visits Menelaus in attempts to obtain news of his father who has not yet returned from the war. The Vaughan Williams' drew inspiration from Menelaus' description to Telemachus of the things Odysseus must do to
Siege of Sparta the Isthmus of Corinth in 265 BC. The defeat was so disastrous for Sparta that they would not rise to be a regional power until the reign of Cleomenes III thirty years later. Siege of Sparta The Siege of Sparta took place in 272 BC and was a battle fought between Epirus, led by King Pyrrhus, ( 297–272 BC) and an alliance consisting of Sparta, under the command of King Areus I ( 309–265 BC) and his heir Acrotatus, and Macedon. The battle was fought at Sparta and ended in a Spartan-Macedonian victory. Following his defeat in Italy by the