Some Features in the Style of Aeschylus

Extract

In this paper I propose to concentrate on some few features in the style of Aeschylus. A clear and very readable account of his style in general has already been given by Prof. Stanford in the book published recently, but in that he deals lightly with the things with which I propose to deal now, the variations of style between the plays and the reasons of them.

But before we come to them, a word about the reasons for the character of his style in general. That, as all readers know, is full of ‘grandiloquence,’ or as the Greeks called it, ὄγκος, of various kinds, mouth-filling words and bold mixed metaphors, and so on. Prof. Stanford suggests incidentally that this may be due to convention, but that is hardly likely. There is little ὄγκος in the very scanty fragments of his predecessors in Tragedy, and it is probable that Aeschylus elevated the style, as, according to tradition, he elevated the staging of the plays.