Menelaus is a king in Greek mythology. He is a major character in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but Aristotle references Euripides’s Menelaus in Orestes. Menelaus is Orestes’s uncle, and in Orestes, Menelaus refuses to support Orestes after Orestes kills his step-father, Aegisthus, and his mother, Clytemnestra. Aristotle refers to Euripides’s Menelaus as an example of “unnecessary badness” in a character, since it is expected that Menelaus will help Orestes because he is his uncle.