chapters 5 through 7 examined a number of competing models for citizenship and selfhood appearing in democratic Athens during the seven decades between around 470 and 399. We saw in Chapter 5 that, after defeating the Persians in 480–479, Athenian democrats in the early days of popular sovereignty wrestled with the demands and risks of public deliberation and decision making under the guidance of elite leaders. Aeschylus' Danaid trilogy frames these demands and risks in the form of a contest citizens face between competing senses of community, types of personal identity, and the reason giving on which each depends. On one hand a “real” man and citizen furthers the interests of his political community by distinguishing himself from foreigners and women and by forming alliances with an eye to the city-state's strategic advantage and autonomy. On the other hand, as a human being, the same citizen cannot resist the pull of compassion and fear drawing him to acknowledge a sense of nonpolitical community with foreigners and women, even when alliance with them imperils his political freedom and civic autonomy. In Suppliants, I suggested, Aeschylus seems repeatedly to be prompting his spectators to think long and hard about Mead's conundrum, about what it might mean in Athens in the 460s to need to be another if one is to be oneself. In slightly different terms, he encourages them to ponder well the consequences of the boundaries they choose to draw around various senses of community and self.