He doesn’t appear in the retelling as a man, only as a name in a song. Demodocus the bard sings of Troy at Alcinous’s feast and Antilochus is one of the dead listed: Achilles, Antilochus, Patroclus, the heroes who fell. The Phaeacians hear it as legend. Odysseus hears it as the name of a friend. Nestor’s son. Killed defending his father in battle, in some tellings by Memnon. The kind of death that turns up in songs because it’s exactly the death a young man hopes for and a father never does. In the retelling he’s mostly a vehicle for the moment the war stops being a story for Odysseus and becomes a list of men he loved. The detail matters: Antilochus is the boy of the cheerful old man at Pylos who fed Telemachus and watched him leave with kind eyes. Nestor came home. His son did not.
Antilochus
Nestor's son. Killed at Troy. A name in Demodocus's song that lands like a stone in Odysseus's chest, one of the dead he fought beside.