Menelaus 's brother happened to be Agamemnon, who was the most powerful king amongst the Greeks. Menelaus and Agamemnon visited all of the Greek Chieftains and persuaded them to join them in a colossal expedition which they were preparing to take down Troy, Agamemnon had been chosen as commander-in-chief; next to him were the most important Greek heroes, his brother Menelaus, Patroclus, and Achilles. Two unrelated men named Ajax, Nestor and his son Antilochus, Teucer, Idomeneus, Diomedes, Odysseus, and Philoctetes, who, however, at the very start of the expedition had to be left behind. They didn 't appear on the scene of action right until the fall of Troy. The entire army consisted of 100,000 Greek warriors, and 1,186 ships came together in the harbor of Aulis.
Before they left for the expedition, they made sacrifices to secure the favor of the gods for the voyage to Troy. While making the sacrifice, a snake darted out from under the altar, went up a tree, devoured eight young sparrows, and the mother had finally turned into stone. This omen Calchas, the seer of the host, interpreted that it meant the war would last nine years and end in the tenth year with the fall of Troy. Agamemnon had previously met an oracle from Delphi that Troy would fall when the heroes of Greece fought amongst each other. In Homer, the crossing to Troy starts immediately, but in the following story, the Greeks accidentally land in Mysia, in the country of Telephus, A storm scatters them, and they