Characters
- Eidothea — daughter; helper
- Proteus — prophetic Old Man of the Sea; shape-shifter
- Seals — Proteus’s flock; disguise material
- Telemachus — audience at Sparta
- Thyestes — wrestler; narrator to Telemachus
Places
- Egypt — ambush shore
- Elysian plain — Menelaus’s prophesied end
- Mycenae — telling-frame
Themes
Narrative
Menelaus tells Telemachus how contrary winds held him off Pharos in Egypt. The nymph Eidothea, daughter of Proteus the immortal Egyptian sea-elder, pities him and teaches the ambush: at noon Proteus rises from the sea to count his seals; Menelaus and three comrades, disguised under seal-skins with ambrosia against the stench, seize the Old Man. Proteus shifts—lion, serpent, leopard, boar, water, tree—yet they hold until he returns to shape and speaks. He names the required sacrifice to Zeus, the fates of Ajax Locrian, Agamemnon, and Odysseus (alive on Calypso’s isle), and prophesies Menelaus’s own end in the Elysian plain because he has Helen as Zeus’s son-in-law. Menelaus obeys, sacrifices, and at last wins his winds home.
Catalogue this Egyptian nostos-ordeal apart from the Spartan hospitality frame and apart from Herodotean or Stesichorean Helen-in-Egypt variants.