The Menelaion — the sanctuary of Menelaus — occupies a hill complex about 5 kilometers from modern Sparta, overlooking the broad floodplain of the Eurotas river. The ancient name for the area was Therapne. In Greek religious practice, heroes (and heroines) occupied a category distinct from gods: closer to human beings, capable of interceding in everyday life, rooted in specific places. Helen and Menelaus were among the most widely worshipped of all heroic pairs, with shrines at several sites across Greece. But the Menelaion at Therapne was their principal cult site in Laconia, and the archaeological evidence suggests that people were making offerings here from the 8th century BCE onward — roughly the same period when Homer's poems were taking their written form.

Beneath the heroic cult lies something older and more surprising. Hector Catling's excavations, conducted several decades after the British School at Athens first dug here in 1909 and 1910, revealed three distinct Mycenaean structures on the ridge of the hill, dating back as far as approximately 1450 BCE. The oldest — Mansion 1 — was a building with three parallel units, its central section identified as a megaron, the great hall of a Mycenaean palace complex. It was destroyed, probably by earthquake, not long after it was built. Two subsequent mansions followed on the same site. Catling concluded that these structures were administrative centers, ancestors of the great palaces at Pylos, Mycenae, and Tiryns — which means that this hill above the Eurotas was inhabited by someone of considerable power roughly three thousand years before the first archaeologist set foot here.

The classical-era sanctuary — the ruins that are visible today — dates from the 5th century BCE and was built on top of an earlier limestone structure from the 6th century, which was itself built over a still earlier phase of worship beginning in the late 8th or early 7th century BCE. Each layer replaced the one before it, but the continuity of devotion at the same spot is striking. Ludwig Ross, who excavated here in 1834, was the first to identify the site as the Menelaion and recovered lead votive figurines of the Laconic type. Nearly a century later, a cistern at the site yielded a blue limestone stele with an inscribed bronze statuette: 'Euthycrenes dedicated to Menelaus.' Two separate dedications to Helen, two to Menelaus. The hill had been receiving gifts for generations.

Richard Catling — Hector's son — continued work at Therapne in the 1980s, excavating a terrace on the south side of the hill. He found disturbed strata full of sub-geometric and early archaic votive offerings mixed with the walls and floors of a structure from the late 13th and 12th centuries BCE. Some of those votive objects were associated with the Mycenaean construction beneath them, suggesting that the people who began worshipping Menelaus and Helen here may have been doing so at a place already understood as ancient and significant — perhaps because ruins or traditions of the Bronze Age palace still shaped the landscape and the memory of the people living nearby. The hero cult, in other words, may have grown from a real Mycenaean presence. The line between myth and history runs somewhere through this hill, and archaeology keeps finding it harder to draw.

Stand on the Menelaion ridge on a clear morning and the Eurotas valley opens below you — the flat green farmland that was Sparta's breadbasket in antiquity, the gentle hills closing in from either side, the long spine of Taygetus rising to the west. Across the valley and slightly to the northwest, the ruined towers of Mystras are visible on their rocky spur. These are two very different worlds that share a landscape: the Bronze Age palace, the ancient heroic shrine, and the medieval Byzantine city all within sight of each other, layered across three millennia of continuous human attachment to this particular piece of ground.