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Among the themes that inform the play the most prominent are: tyranny, religious fanaticism, masks (theatricality, disguise), a blurring of gender, madness, mass hysteria, and politics. There are in fact more, but these are perhaps the ones that most easily bridge the distance from the 5th century BCE, when the play was written, to our own times. Apart from these individual themes there is also what one critic has called "a slippage of opposites" – themes of opposition that interweave with each other throughout the play to create an extraordinarily rich tapestry. Among these, the most important are: male/female, reality/illusion, order/anarchy, tyranny/political compro-mise, and madness/sanity. Finally, the unusual structure and story-line of the play call into question the definition of tragedy, since, despite the fact that it undoubtedly tragic in its outcome, in effect there is no true tragic hero in the play, and it also contains surprising moments of comedy. All of these contradictions and oppositions within the traditional structure of a Greek tragedy have led me into a search for a revised, up-dated interpretation of the meaning of tragedy in our times.   David Zinder