I feel like we don’t talk about menelaus’ guilt enough when it comes to the entire trojan war. His wife goes missing and he can’t even handle it on his own, he comes running to his brother for help (which is fair I guess but also you are a grown ass man). And as a result he has to sacrifice his own niece to even start the damn war
Then there’s all the men who have died for his cause, ten years of bloodshed and there is not a sliver of hope throughout any of it. He’s lost countless comrades and has grieved more than he thought he would in a lifetime. After all this time he wonders if perhaps he is at fault, if helen left him willingly, if he led the men of greece to a doomed war, if he will have to build a pyre for his brother next
Not to mention the entirety of the oresteia. Sure, most of that isn’t his directly his fault, but it was set off by the trojan war. He urges orestes not to give up entirely because he cannot lose his nephew, he cannot lose the one bit of hope of keeping his father’s side of the family together
There is also the strain between himself and helen, the way people curse her name after the war, how he is powerless to stop it. Maybe if he was faster, a better strategist, more brutal, maybe the war would have been seven years, or five or two. Maybe if he had never left sparta at all and stayed by helen’s side none of this would have happened
Agamemnon was in charge of the men’s lives but it was menelaus who endangered them in the first place
Idk man… many such cases
