He laughs first when Telemachus calls the assembly. He speaks with the contempt of a man who has never been refused. He turns Penelope’s loom trick into proof of her contempt for them, the reason they will not wait another day. He throws a footstool at an old beggar across the hall and the room laughs with him. He is the lone face the besieging suitors wear, the one whose voice carries when others go quiet. [SPOILER: He is reaching for a cup of wine when the first arrow comes. It takes him in the throat. The cup falls. The wine spills across the stone, mixing with the blood that runs darker, faster. He is on his feet a moment, hands at his throat, and then he is down. No one in that room had seen it coming. His father Eupeithes raises the avenging fathers to march up from the town for blood-price. He dies for that too, on Laertes’s spear.]
Antinous
The worst of the suitors. Tall, dark-eyed, careless cruelty of someone never told no. Throws a footstool at the beggar. Dies first.