What does Menelaus have to do with the East, one might ask.
It has to do with it because Homer was writing in Ionia, a small coastal region in Asia Minor, also home to the early pre-Socratic philosophers.
In the Iliad there are 21 mentions of blond characters: Menelaus was blond, or rather he was the blond Menelaus, always described that way; but Achilles, Meleager and Demeter, even Nestor's 150 mares were also blond. Agamedes, daughter of Augias king of Ilia, who do not participate in the war, is described as blond.
In the Odyssey, XIII 397 ff., Athena camouflages Odysseus before he faces the Proci and “makes the blond hair disappear from his head.”
Athena herself then, in the statue of Phidias in Athens, was depicted with hair of gold and skin of ivory, that is, χρῡσελεφάντινος chrȳselephántinos.
This differs from how the Greeks of today seem to us, dark-haired. It is not excluded that this was not the case at the time.
The origin of the Hellenes, or Greeks, is quaintly long and varied: it starts with the Minoans (the splendid culture of Crete, c. 2500-1600 b.e.v.), then probably came the Achaeans, then the Danunas, almost simultaneously with the Mycenaeans, and then again the Ionians and Aeolians. Homer, on the other hand, names only the Achaeans and Danaans, who may be the Aḫḫiyawa and the Danuna, the latter being part of the Sea Peoples, who are credited with part of the responsibility for the collapse of the eastern world toward the end of the Bronze Age (1200 b.e.v.).
But that is another story.
