παρδαλέῃ μὲν πρῶτα μετάφρενον εὐρὺ κάλυψε
In this second of the dressing scenes, Menelaos puts on a leopard skin. Outside of Book 10, the only hero who wears an animal skin is Paris, who likewise wears a leopard skin at Iliad 3.17 when he makes his challenge to the Achaeans. In that encounter, Menelaos does not wear an animal skin, but it is telling that, in the same passage, Menelaos is compared in a simile to a lion that suddenly finds the body of an animal to eat (Iliad 3.23–26). Because of the way that duel comes to an end (Paris is ultimately whisked away to safety by Aphrodite), there is no chance for Menelaos to strip him and take the skin as spoils. Instead, Menelaos’ dressing scene here makes him parallel to Paris, Helen’s other husband. The two husbands have other common traits as well. As we will see below, Menelaos has a tendency to “give way” (10.121). This tendency is shared by this other younger brother of a leader (it is likewise his brother Hektor who describes Paris as one who gives way, Iliad 6.521–523). The connections between the two are a good example of what John Foley calls “traditional referentiality,” which is the kind of meaning made possible by tradition for an audience on the inside of that tradition.
We should also note that Paris, our other wearer of leopard skin, has associations with ambush. He fights even in daytime battle as an ambushing archer (in Iliad 11 he wounds Diomedes, Machaon, and Eurupylos with his arrows), and, as we have explored above (see pp. 57–61), archery and ambush are conceptually and even visually linked. On the alterity of archer figures, see also Lissarrague 1990:13–34. On attitudes toward archery in the Iliad, see also Farron 2003, who disputes Lorimer’s (1950:289–305) claim that archery is lower class and ineffective. In several (primarily late) accounts of Achilles’ death, Paris ambushes him in the sanctuary of Thymbraion when he comes, unarmed, to arrange his marriage to Polyxena. (See Dictys of Crete 3.2ff, Dares 27, Hyginus 110, and Philostratus Heroikos 51.1. with Burgess 1995.) These late sources may preserve a vestige of a tradition about Achilles’ death at the hands of Paris by archery and ambush. At the very least, surviving evidence (including what we know of the now lost Aithiopis) indicates that in Archaic myth Achilles died after receiving an arrow wound to the ankle (Burgess 1995:225). It may be that Paris’ leopard skin is an iconographic sign of his archer status (cf. Naiden 1999: “Like the leopard, archery is crucial yet marginal, inferior yet effective” [200]), and the overlap between the conceptual realms of archery and ambush warfare, which we have explored in detail in “The Poetics of Ambush,” might explain why Paris wears a leopard skin even in a non-ambush context.