Antinous

Antinous, son of Eupeithes, is the most arrogant of Penelope's suitors in Homer's Odyssey and the first to fall to Odysseus' arrow. With Eurymachus he leads the young nobles who devour the household of Ithaca while its king is away, and none of them is more violent.

At the assembly in Book 2 he blames Penelope for the suitors' long stay, since she keeps them all hoping, and reveals her trick: for three years she wove a shroud for Laertes by day and unpicked it by night. When Telemachus sails off for news of his father, Antinous takes twenty men to ambush him on his way home, in the strait between Ithaca and Samos. The trap fails, and he proposes to kill the young man in the countryside instead, but Amphinomus persuades the others to wait for a sign from the gods. Penelope rebukes him in front of everyone: years before, Odysseus had saved his father Eupeithes from the fury of the people of Ithaca.

When Odysseus returns disguised as a beggar, Antinous refuses him a scrap of bread and hurls a footstool that strikes his shoulder, so harshly that even the other suitors reproach him. He gives Penelope a great embroidered robe fastened with twelve golden brooches, sets up the fistfight between the stranger and the beggar Irus and, in the contest of the bow, puts off his own attempt and threatens the beggar for asking to try. In Book 22, as he lifts a golden cup of wine, Odysseus' first arrow against the suitors pierces his throat; he kicks over the table as he falls, and the slaughter begins.

His death does not end the story. In the last book his father Eupeithes stirs up the families of the dead suitors to avenge them and is struck down by a spear thrown by old Laertes, Odysseus' father; only then does Athena impose peace on Ithaca.