Chapter 2 turns to the role of language in the context of strategy, specifically investigating how rhetoric and persuasion can open and close spaces for the airing of opinions freely amongst speakers. It is in creating and expressing opinion (and not truth) in the polis – the space of appearances – that the question of who one is receives its full disclosure. We then turn to the appearance of strategy in ancient Greece, first in the figure of Pericles, then Alcibiades, and in particular the latter’s skilful performances in the polis, and a gifted if contested career blighted, we suggest, by a failure to apprehend the distinction between the polis (rhetoric) and oikos (sophistry and instrumentality). The failure of Alcibiades also hints at some of the difficulties of language as the means of self-disclosure and so also for Arendt’s idealized association of action with talk, for it is in Alcibiades’ struggle as a strategos that opinion becomes twisted into event: Things get done, even if the action is consumed by failure and ruin. The case of Alcibiades takes us from talk to the body, and back to the polis in which the everyday is suspended so that action, freed from instrumentality, can occur and recur, each time alive and enlivening.