Menippus was born in Phylace, a city in Thessaly in northern Greece, the son of Hippasus, a nobleman of the region who traced his descent from the ancient heroes of the north. Thessaly was a land of horse-breeders and warriors, a broad plain ringed by mountains where the finest cavalry in Greece was raised, and Phylace was one of its oldest settlements, a city whose name appears in the Catalogue of Ships, the great list of the Greek forces that Homer appended to the second book of the Iliad. Menippus grew up in this tradition, trained in the use of the spear and the shield from boyhood, and when the call went out across Greece for warriors to sail against Troy, he answered it as a matter of honour, leaving his father's house to join the muster at Aulis, the harbour in Boeotia where Agamemnon gathered the fleet.

He sailed with Protesilaus, the first king of Phylace, or with his brother Podarces, who succeeded him after Protesilaus was killed leaping from his ship onto the Trojan shore, the first Greek to die in the war. The men of Phylace were renowned for their courage, and Menippus was no exception. He fought in every major engagement of the first nine years of the war, standing in the phalanx beside warriors from every corner of Greece, from the islands of the Aegean to the mountains of Arcadia. He was not a hero of the first rank, not a man whose name would be sung in the great halls of Mycenae or Pylos, but he was a reliable soldier, a man who held his place in the line and did not break when the Trojans charged.

The defining episode of Menippus's life was the battle for the ships, the desperate struggle that occupies the fifteenth book of the Iliad. After nine years of stalemate, the Trojans had broken through the Greek wall and were pressing toward the beached ships, their torches ready to burn the fleet and strand the Greeks in Asia Minor forever. Hector, the heir to the Trojan throne and the greatest warrior on either side, led the assault, and his fury was so terrible that even the Greek champions fell back before him. The ships were the Greeks' only means of escape, and their loss would mean the destruction of the entire expedition. Every man who could stand took up his spear and shield and formed a desperate line between Hector and the wooden hulls.

In this chaos, Hector saw Menippus. The Trojan prince was cutting his way through the Greek ranks, his bronze armour gleaming, his war-cry splitting the air, and he singled out Menippus as a worthy victim, a man whose death would demoralise the defenders. Some accounts say that Hector threw his spear and struck Menippus in the chest, piercing his shield and his breastplate and driving through to his heart. Others say that Hector closed with him hand to hand and killed him with a sword-thrust. In every version, Menippus fell in the dust of the plain, his body crumpling beside the wall of the ships, his blood soaking into the earth that had already drunk the blood of a thousand men before him. He died without a famous last word, without a divine parent to avenge him, without a prophecy to mark his passing. He simply fell, and the battle rolled over him.

But his death was not unavenged. Antilochus, the son of Nestor, the old king of Pylos whose wisdom was as famous as his warriors were brave, saw Menippus fall and saw Hector exulting over the body. Antilochus was young, the fastest runner among the Greeks after Achilles himself, and he was devoted to the older warriors who had taught him the art of war. He hurled his spear at Hector, and though he did not kill the Trojan prince, he wounded him and drove him back from the ships, buying precious time for the Greek defence. The poet of the Iliad records this exchange in a few swift lines: Menippus falls, Hector boasts, Antilochus strikes, and the battle continues. The brevity is itself a comment on the nature of war: one man's death is another man's opportunity, and the poet who immortalises the fall of Hector has only a few words to spare for the man Hector killed.

Menippus's body was recovered by his comrades after the battle, or it was left on the field to be stripped by the Trojans and recovered later, depending on the tide of the fighting. The Greeks burned their dead on great pyres outside the camp, and Menippus's bones were gathered with those of the other fallen and placed in a communal tomb, a mound of earth that would be forgotten when the Greeks sailed home. His father Hippasus, if he was still alive in Phylace, would never know the exact manner of his son's death, only that he had died at Troy and that his name was mentioned in the song of the war. For the Greeks who heard the Iliad sung in their halls, Menippus was a reminder that the war was not merely the story of Achilles and Hector, of gods and heroes, but also the story of thousands of men who fought and died without glory, whose only share in immortality was the poet's brief mention of their fall.