Menelaus is a name from the old Greek stories, not a word for a kind of person. He is king of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon (the Greek leader in the war), and husband of Helen — the Helen people call Helen of Troy. The usual telling says Paris, a prince of Troy, takes Helen from him (some versions say she goes willingly), and that insult is the spark for the long war at Troy. After Troy falls, Menelaus takes Helen home; later stories show the two of them older, back in Sparta, still talking about the war. You will meet him in the Iliad and the Odyssey. English keeps the capital letter because it is a name. People say it roughly like MEN-uh-lay-us. Though actually, in the poems he is not the great hero of the war — Achilles and Odysseus get more of the glory — he is the husband whose marriage the whole fight is supposedly about.