When Pericles son of Xanthippos rose to speak in honor of the Athenian dead from the first year of the Peloponnesian War, coming “forward from the tomb and standing on a high platform, so that he might be heard by as many people as possible in the crowd” (Thucydides 2.34), he stood as a privileged and powerful representative of the strong side of three social polarities in ancient Athens: he was free not slave, citizen not foreign, and male not female. These “either/or” contrasts were part of the basic Athenian - and indeed Greek - political and social vocabulary, but they did not create a simple bipolar society of one united “us” versus one excluded “other.” Rather, the three sets of polarities combined to create a complex set of identities and a community in which male and female members of citizen households lived side by side with free and enslaved foreigners, male and female. Representatives of this complex community stood together in the Kerameikos to hear the words of Pericles on that day in 431 - just as they stood (willingly or unwillingly) behind the energetic and creative achievements of the Periclean era.