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
William Menelaus previously given artworks to the Cardiff Free Library, he left the residual 36 pieces valued at £10,000 to the same institution. Today they are all part of the Welsh National art collection, and mainly hang in the National Museum Cardiff, although his portrait by Parker Hagarty is on loan to Cardiff University's engineering department. Menelaus was buried on 4 April 1882 in the churchyard at Penderyn, Rhondda Cynon Taf, in the same brick grave that had already held his wife for thirty years. William Menelaus William Menelaus (10 March 1818 – 30 March 1882) was a Scottish-born mechanical engineer, who