Menelaus Tyndareus would support him in his courting of Tyndareus’s niece Penelope, the daughter of Icarius. Tyndareus readily agreed, and Odysseus proposed that, before the decision was made, all the suitors should swear a most solemn oath to defend the chosen husband in any quarrel. Then it was decreed that straws were to be drawn for Helen’s hand. The suitor who won was Menelaus (Tyndareus, not to displease the powerful Agamemnon offered him another of his daughters, Clytaemnestra). The rest of the suitors swore their oaths, and Helen and Menelaus were married, Menelaus becoming a ruler of Sparta with Helen after
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