him with having preferred Stilpo to Plato. Diogenes Laërtius (ii. 134 and 135) says that he declined to identify the Good with the Useful, and that he denied the value of the negative proposition on the ground that affirmation alone can express truth. He probably meant to imply that qualities have no existence apart from the subject to which they belong. In ethics, we learn from Plutarch (De virt. mor. 2) and from Cicero (Acad. ii. 42) that he regarded Virtue as one, by whatever name it be called, and maintained that it is intellectual. Cicero’s evidence is the less valuable in that he always assumed that Menedemus was a follower of the Megarians. Diogenes says that he left no writings, and the Eretrian school disappeared after a short and unobtrusive existence.
Beside the ancient sources quoted above, see H. Mallett, Histoire de l’école de Mégare et des écoles d’Elis et d’Erétrie (1845). Also the articles Megarian School; Phaedo; Stilpo.
MENELAUS, in Greek legend, son of Atreus (or Pleisthenes), king of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon and husband of Helen. He was one of the Greeks who entered Troy concealed in the wooden horse (Virgil, Aeneid, 264) and recovered his wife at the sack of the city. On the voyage homewards his fleet was scattered off Cape Malea by a storm, which drove him to Egypt. After eight years' wandering in the east, he landed on the island of Pharos, where Proteus revealed to him the means of appeasing the gods and securing his return. He reached Sparta on the day on which Orestes was holding the funeral feast over Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. After a long and happy life in Lacedaemon, Menelaus, as the son-in-law of Zeus, did not die but was translated to Elysium (Homer, Odyssey, iii. iv.). His grave and that of Helen were shown at Therapnae, where he was worshipped as a god (Pausanias iii. 19, 9). He was represented in works of art as carrying off the body of the dead Patroclus or lifting up his hand to slay Helen.
MENELEK II. (Sahala Mariem), emperor of Abyssinia, officially negus negusti (king of kings) of Ethiopia (1844 – ), son of Haeli Melicoth, king of Shoa, was born in 1844, and claimed to be a direct descendant of Solomon by the queen of Sheba. On the death of his father in 1855 he was kept a prisoner at Gondar by Kassai, the governor, who had seized the throne under the title of Theodore III. But having succeeded in effecting his escape he was acknowledged king of Shoa, and at once attacked the usurper. These campaigns were unsuccessful, and he turned his arms to the west, east and south, and annexed much territory to his kingdom, still, however, maintaining his divine right to the crown of Ethiopia. After the death of Theodore in 1888 he continued to struggle against his successor, the emperor Johannes (better known to Europeans as King John of Abyssinia). Being again unsuccessful, he resolved to await a more propitious occasion; so, acknowledging the supremacy of Johannes, in 1886 he married his daughter Zeodita (b. 1876) to the emperor’s son, the Ras Area; he was thereupon declared heir to the empire, and on his side acknowledged the Ras Area as his successor. Ras Area died in May 1888, and the emperor Johannes was killed in a war against the dervishes at the battle of Gallabat (Matemma) on the 10th of March 1889. The succession now lay between the late emperor’s natural son, the Ras Mangasha, and Menelek, but the latter was elected by a large majority on the 4th of November, and consecrated shortly afterwards. Menelek had married in 1883 Taïtu (b. 1854) a princess of Tigré, a lady who had been married four times previously and who exercised considerable influence. Menelek’s clemency to Mangasha, whom he compelled to submit and then made viceroy of Tigré, was ill repaid by a long series of revolts. In 1889, at the time when he was claiming the throne against Mangasha, Menelek signed at Uccialli a treaty with Italy acknowledging Italian claims to the Asmara district. Finding, however, that according to the Italian view of one of its articles the treaty placed his empire under Italian domination, Menelek denounced it; and after defeating the Italians at Amba-Alagi, he compelled them to capitulate at Adowa in February 1896, and a treaty was signed recognizing the absolute independence of Abyssinia. His French sympathies were shown in a reported official offer of treasure towards payment of the indemnity at the close of the Franco-Prussian War, and in February 1897 he concluded a commercial treaty with France on very favourable terms. He also gave assistance to French officers who sought to reach the upper Nile from Abyssinia, there to join forces with the Marchand Mission; and Abyssinian armies were sent Nilewards. A British mission under Sir Rennell Rodd in May 1897, however, was cordially received, and Menelek agreed to a settlement of the Somali boundaries, to keep open to British commerce the caravan route between Zaila and Harrar, and to prevent the transit of munitions of war to the Mahdists, whom he proclaimed enemies of Abyssinia. In the following year the Sudan was reconquered by an Anglo-Egyptian army and thereafter cordial relations between Menelek and the British authorities were established. In 1889 and subsequent years, Menelek sent forces to co-operate with the British troops engaged against the Somali mullah, Mahommed Abdullah. Menelek had in 1898 crushed a rebellion by Ras Mangasha (who died in 1906) and he directed his efforts henceforth to the consolidation of his authority, and in a certain degree, to the opening up of his country to western civilization. He had granted in 1894 a concession for the building of a railway to his capital from the French port of Jibuti, but, alarmed by a claim made by France in 1902 to the control of the line in Abyssinian territory, he stopped for four years the extension of the railway beyond Dire Dawa. When in 1906 France, Great Britain and Italy came to an agreement on the subject, Menelek officially reiterated his full sovereign rights over the whole of his empire. In May 1909 the emperor’s grandson Lij Yasu, or Jeassu, then a lad of thirteen, was married to Romanie (b. 1902), granddaughter of the negus Johannes. Two days later Yasu was publicly proclaimed at Adis Ababa as Menelek’s successor. At that time the emperor was seriously ill and as his ill-health continued, a council of regency—from which the emperor was excluded—was formed in March 1910. (See also Abyssinia.)
MENÉNDEZ Y PELAYO, MARCELINO (1856 – ), Spanish scholar and critic, was born at Santander on the 3rd of November 1856. In 1871–1872 he studied under Mila y Fontanals at the university of Barcelona, whence he proceeded to the central university of Madrid. His academic successes had never been surpassed; a special law was passed by the Cortes to enable him to become a professor at the age of twenty-two, and three years later he was elected a member of the Spanish Academy. But before this date (1882) he was well known throughout Spain. His first volume, Estudios críticos sobre escritores montañeses (1876), had attracted little notice, and his scholarly Horacio en España (1877) appealed only to students. He became famous through his Ciencia española (1878), a collection of polemical essays defending the national tradition against the attacks of political and religious reformers. The unbending orthodoxy of this work is, if possible, still more pronounced in the Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–1886), and the writer was hailed as the champion of the ultramontane party. His lectures (1881) on Calderón established his reputation as a literary critic; and his work as an historian of Spanish literature was continued in his Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (1881–1891), his edition (1890–1903) of Lope de Vega, his Antología de poetas líricos castellanos (1890–1906), and his Orígenes de la novela (1905).
MENENIUS LANATUS, AGRIPPA, Roman patrician and statesman, consul 503 B.C. On the occasion of the first secession of the people to the Sacred Mount, Agrippa, who was known to be a man of moderate views, was one of the commissioners empowered by the senate to treat with the seceders. On this occasion he recited the well-known fable of the belly and the members.
Livy ii. 16, 32, 33; Dion. Halic. v. 44–47; vi. 49–88, 96; Val. Max. iv. 4, 2.
MENES, the name of the founder of the 1st Dynasty of historical kings of Egypt. He appears at the head of the lists not only in Herodotus and Manetho, but also in the native Turin Papyrus of Kings and the lists of Abydos, while the list
