Who Are the Suitors in The Odyssey?

The suitors are the young noblemen of Ithaca and the islands around it who move into Odysseus's palace while he is missing, courting his wife Penelope on the confident assumption that the king is dead. They are not villains from outside the story. They are the sons of Ithaca's own leading families, and that is what makes them dangerous: the threat to the house comes from within its own society, wearing the manners of guests.

If you are meeting the cast for the first time, who is who in the Odyssey sets these men against the figures they are trying to displace.

How Many Suitors, and Who Leads Them

Homer does not leave the number vague. In Book 16, Telemachus counts them for his father: 108 young men, drawn from Ithaca and the neighbouring islands of Dulichium, Same, and Zacynthus, waited on by their own servants. It is a small army billeted inside a single hall.

Two of them lead. Antinous is the boldest and cruellest, the one who drives the plot to ambush and kill Telemachus (Book 4) and who hurls a footstool at the disguised Odysseus, a beggar in his own doorway (Book 17). Eurymachus is the smoother operator, always ready with a plausible excuse and a soft word for Penelope. Between them they set the tone: entitlement backed by force.

What They Do to the House

The suitors do not court politely and wait for an answer. They occupy the palace day after day, slaughter Odysseus's herds for their feasts, drink his wine, harass the serving women, and mock his son. They are eating a kingdom. Penelope holds them off with her famous trick, weaving a shroud for old Laertes by day and unpicking it by night (Book 2), but the delay only buys time; it does not remove them.

Worse than the waste is the plot against Telemachus. When the young man sails off to seek news of his father, Antinous organises an ambush to kill him on his return (Book 4). The suitors are no longer merely rivals for a widow's hand. They are conspirators against the heir.

What the Suitors Represent

The suitors are more than a crowd of bad guests. They are Homer's picture of what happens to a society when its king is gone and no one is held to account. The Greek ideal they trample is xenia, the sacred law of guest-friendship: a host protects the stranger, and a guest honours the house. The suitors invert it completely. They are guests who devour their host, occupiers who call themselves visitors.

That is why the poem treats their presence as a moral emergency, not a social awkwardness. Their collapse of order runs parallel to Telemachus's own coming of age; why Telemachus matters is largely the story of a boy learning to stand against them. And the strain they put on Penelope is the engine of her intelligence, explored in Penelope.

How the Suitors Die

Their end fills Book 22. Penelope sets the contest of the bow, the suitors try and fail to string it, and the disguised beggar takes his turn. The first arrow kills Antinous through the throat as he lifts a cup, dying without ever understanding that the man he mocked was the man whose absence he had been feasting on. Eurymachus tries to bargain, then to fight, and falls too. The doors are barred; none escape. On why Homer makes the reckoning so total, see why the ending of the Odyssey is so violent.

To read the whole occupation and its undoing in Homer's own lines, the Home Pack ($19) carries the complete Odyssey in Samuel Butler's public-domain translation, plus character cards that keep Antinous, Eurymachus, and the rest in order as you go.