Antinous (Ἀντίνοος)

Spokesman of the Suitors

Nearly every appearance of Antinous in the epic is a collective statement on behalf of the suitors. In the assembly of Ithaca in Book 2, faced with Telemachus' accusations, he turns the blame around and lays the delay at Penelope's door: she wove by day and unwove by night, holding everyone in suspense with a three-year ruse. Antinous is the first to "rationalize" the suitors' conduct — the fault, he claims, lies not with those who consume the house but with the woman who will not remarry.

The speech establishes his position among the suitors: he is not merely one of them, but their spokesman and lawgiver. When the assembly breaks up over an omen of eagles, which Halitherses reads as a portent of doom for the suitors, it is Eurymachus who scoffs the omen away — and Antinous who supplies the confidence behind the scoff. Hybris is his defining trait from the very beginning.

The Plot: Ambush at Asteris

When Antinous learns that Telemachus has slipped away to Pylos, his response is not restraint but escalation. He proposes an ambush on the small island of Asteris, between Ithaca and Same, to intercept the prince on his way home (Book 4). In Book 16, with the ambush failed and the suitors back in Ithaca, Antinous proposes something more radical: to kill Telemachus in the countryside when he leaves the palace for his estates.

These two plots mark the extreme form of the conflict between Antinous and the house of Odysseus. The suitors slide from "eating the master's wealth" to "killing the master's son," and it is Antinous who drives the slide. He does not even bother to wait for a pretext — in his eyes, Odysseus' estate is already theirs, and all that remains is to clear the path.

Insult and Incitement

If Antinous is a plotter in the poem's first half, from Book 17 onward he appears chiefly as an insulter. When Odysseus returns to his own palace disguised as a beggar, Antinous is the first to raise a hand: he abuses the swineherd Eumaeus for bringing the beggar in, then hurls a footstool that strikes Odysseus on the right shoulder. In Book 18 he eggs on the beggar Irus to fight the "stranger," promising the winner a roasted goat's paunch — staking human dignity as mere sport. In Book 21, at the contest of the bow, it is he who proposes postponing the trial until after the feast of Apollo, nearly derailing Penelope's judgment and stretching the delay to its final hour.

It is worth noting that the poem contains suitors who pull back when warned — Amphinomus, whom Odysseus himself advises to leave the house. Antinous never belongs to that company. His insolence has no turn and no hesitation, down to the very end.

The First Arrow

The slaughter of Book 22 opens with the death of Antinous, and Homer stages the moment with full drama:

“

But Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat, and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out — he pitched to one side, the cup dropped from his grasp, and a thick jet of mortal blood burst from his nostrils.

He dies without even knowing whom he faces. Odysseus then throws off his disguise and declares the justice of the massacre. The symbolism of Antinous' death could hardly be plainer: the first man to violate xenia is the first to be punished. And in Book 24 his father Eupeithes musters the kinsmen of the dead to seek revenge, so that the violence ripples to the poem's final page — as if Antinous' insolence could not be finished off by a single death.