Menelaus Menelaus In Greek mythology, Menelaus (; , "Menelaos", from μένος "vigor, rage, power" and λαός "people," "wrath of the people") was a king of Mycenaean (pre-Dorian) Sparta, the husband of Helen of Troy, and the son of Atreus and Aerope. According to the "Iliad", Menelaus was a central figure in the Trojan War, leading the Spartan contingent of the Greek army, under his elder brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. Prominent in both the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", Menelaus was also popular in Greek vase painting and Greek tragedy, the latter more as a hero of the Trojan War than as a
1647 Menelaus its official discovery observation. In 1993, Andrea Milani suggested that "Menelaus" might be the parent body of an asteroid family based on a modified HCM-analysis. The finding was also mentioned by David Jewitt in 2004, who noted that the Menelaus family is the largest proposed dynamical family to exist among the Jupiter trojans, despite having only 8 members. In 2008, Fernando Roig and Ricardo Gil-Hutton described this particular aggregation of Jupiter trojans as the "Menelaus clan", which, similar to the Flora family in the inner asteroid belt, is composed of several families (or subfamilies). In this publication, the Menelaus clan