Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men, whether for good of for bad.".
According to Pericles, a great woman does not succumb to natural senses and should never be the subject of any gossip, whether good or bad. In his eulogy, Pericles only mentions women once in order to stipulate their position in Athens: below men. Pericles has touched on how Athens is different from any other because of the laws and government they enforce, and now speaks about their military and how it is different from others. Athenians welcome any foreigners and offer them equal opportunities to learn, observe, and work. All people, even those who are not natural born Athenians, are seen as equal and are given the same opportunities because of the law. A foreign man who is ready to live by Athenian law should never be considered inferior to a man born in Athens. The democracy in which the Athenians live enforces the laws, which set the criteria to define that all men are offered equal justice no matter their social standing, public life, intelligence, or achievements. .
Plato, unlike Thucydides argues that equality and specialization, a person's unique roles in society, are not capable of co-existing. This is primarily because in Plato's ideal society, specialization is comprised of inequalities of functions. Each person's techne or specialization is determined by the type of soul he has. In Phaedo, Plato touches on Socrates' concept of the soul and discovers a unique form of inferiority. Plato agrees and uses four arguments to prove that the body is inferior to the soul. The first is the argument from opposites; when one dies he or she does not stay dead but instead comes back to life. The second argument is the theory of recollection, this theory draws that all learning is a matter of recollecting what one already knows.