Greek Tragic Style: Form, Language and Interpretation

R. B. Rutherford

May 2012 · Cambridge University Press

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Greek tragedy is widely read and performed, but outside the commentary tradition detailed study of the poetic style and language of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides has been relatively neglected. This book seeks to fill that gap by providing an account of the poetics of the tragic genre. The author describes the varied handling of spoken dialogue and of lyric song; major topics such as vocabulary, rhetoric and imagery are considered in detail and illustrated from a broad range of plays. The contribution of the chorus to the dramas is also discussed. Characterisation, irony and generalising statements are treated in separate chapters and these topics are illuminated by comparisons which show not only what is shared by the three major dramatists but also what distinguishes their practice. The book sheds light both on the genre as a whole and on many particular passages.

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R. B. Rutherford was appointed Tutor at Christ Church, Oxford in 1982 and has taught there since, covering Greek and Latin literature in tutorials and lectures. His published work ranges across Greek and Latin, prose and verse, epic, historiography and philosophic prose. Among other works Rutherford has published a Cambridge commentary on books 19 and 20 of the Odyssey (1992), a readable monograph on Homer (1996) and a survey of the whole of classical literature in less than 400 pages (2005). Greek tragedy was the focus of one of his earliest articles and has been a major interest to him ever since.