For this is the mark of the self, the seal of its greatness and the token of its weakness alike: it is silent. The tragic hero has only one language that is completely proper to him: silence. It has been so from the very beginning. The tragic devised itself the artistic form of the drama precisely so as to be able to present silence... In his silence the hero burns the bridges connecting him to god and the world, elevates himself above the realm of personality, which in speech, defines itself against others and individualises itself, and so enters the icy loneliness of the self. The self knows of nothing other than itself; its loneliness is absolute. How else can it activate this loneliness, this rigid and defiant self-sufficiency, except in silence. And so it is in the tragedies of Aeschylus, as even contemporaries noticed.

--FRANZ ROZENWEIG