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Antinous is the most arrogant and defiant of Penelope’s suitors. He clearly sees himself as a ringleader, and he consistently attempts to assert his dominance over both Penelope and the other men who are vying for her hand. At the start of the epic, for instance, he reminds the other suitors of the ruse that Penelope concocted to put off remarrying—she claimed she would choose a husband after she finished weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law while secretly undoing the knitting each night so that the shroud would never be finished—and insists that her father must choose a husband for her.
If Poseidon is Odysseus’s divine antagonist, then Antinous is his mortal one, and his character encapsulates the offense and entitlement inherent in the suitors’ actions as a whole. As the epic progresses, however, it becomes apparent that Antinous is more sinister than the rest. For instance, he wants to ambush and kill Telemachus when he returns from Sparta even though other suitors, led by Amphinomus, wish to wait and see what the gods have to say first, suggesting he is as feckless as he is vicious. He also strikes Odysseus (who is disguised as an old man) with a stool, to the horror of Penelope and the other suitors. These two moments are integral to Antinous’s characterization because, in both cases, he is deliberately cruel rather than merely audacious, not content to merely take over Odysseus’s home and court his wife. Unsurprisingly, the most damning critiques of Antinous are delivered by Penelope, who refers to the suitor as an “insolent and wicked schemer” and “the worst of all . . . black death itself.” As he is arguably the worst of the suitors, it makes sense that he is the first to die. Odysseus kills Antinous by shooting an arrow through his throat, a symbolic death because Antinous, the self-appointed voice of the suitors, is eternally silenced.
