When You Can't Go Home Again: The Destruction of the oikos in Greek Tragedy.

This dissertation examines how Greek tragedians depicting familial destruction draw upon a Classical Athenian view of this experience. It comprises four case-studies: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Euripides’ Heracles and Ion. I examine how each tragedy engages with the Attic oikos on the levels of imagery, plot, and character development. Special focuses are the role of the physical house in tragedy and at Classical Athens and how tragedy depicts a similar public perspective on the house and household as Attic oratory. This dissertation argues that when tragic families experience demise they elicited a culturally embedded pity and fear in their Athenian audience members who were able to understand the suffering of tragic oikos-destruction in terms of experience in their own oikoi.