δόμος

δόμος (domos, "DOH-moss") is the poets' word for a house, and the record shows it living almost entirely in verse: 726 occurrences across 39 works. The Odyssey holds the most at 101, and after Homer the tragedians take over — the Electra (52), then the Iliad again (45), the Libation Bearers (42), the Ion (40), the Orestes (40). Frisk (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72) states the division plainly: δόμος is used "predominantly poetically, for οἶκος (oikos, "house, household") and οἰκία (oikia, "dwelling"), since Homer." Where prose said oikos, poetry reached for domos.

And in that poetry the house is rarely only shelter. Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) notes that δόμος, originally a term of social institution, comes also to name the house of Hades (the god of the underworld and its realm), the residence of the dead below. So the same word that raises a family's roof can point downward, to the last house anyone enters.

The etymology sharpens this. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) gives the root as dem-/domo-, "house," and compares Latin domus ("house, home"); LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) files the word under the kindred verb δέμω (demō, "to build"). At bottom, then, δόμος is the built house — and Beekes's own gloss keeps it plain and domestic: "house, living, room."

Yet the corpus does not always let it stay merely built. One surface the record carries is δόμοις ("in the houses"), cited from Aeschylus's Agamemnon (lines 1035–1038) — the built house declined into the case that puts someone inside it, on a tragic stage where houses tend to hold more than their walls.

If a word for "the built house" also names the house of the dead, what has the building come to hold?