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The father’s subsequent confrontation with Menelaus is so stilted and jumbled that it nearly derails the play.

When the woman is a powerful man’s wife — Helen was married to King Menelaus of Sparta — the effort to retrieve her can hardly help escalating to armed conflict.

Proclus credits Pythagoras, for example, with discovering the theorem we now call Pythagoras’s theorem, and Menelaus the theorem that is the mathematical foundation for Ptolemaic astronomy.

It is only through sheer persistence that Menelaus, the great hero, is able to wrestle Proteus to a standstill.

Part of the interest of the Odyssey, as distinguished from the Iliad, lies in the details, such as are given in the story of Nausicaä and the visit of Telemachus to Menelaus.