Sparta shrine associated with Menelaus, located east of Sparta, by the river Eurotas, on the hill "Profitis Ilias" (Coordinates: ). Built early 8th century BC it was believed by Spartans to be the home of Menelaus. In 1970 the British School in Athens started excavations in an attempt to locate Mycenaean remains in the area around Menelaion. Among other findings, they uncovered the remains of two Mycenaean mansions and found the first offerings dedicated to Helen and Menelaus. These mansions were destroyed by earthquake and fire, and archaeologists consider them the possible palace of Menelaus himself. Excavations made from the early
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