Pericles

The "First Citizen of Athens" who turned a city into a school for Greece and a monument to the human spirit. Pericles steered the democracy through its most brilliant and its most tragic hours, commissioning the Parthenon as a testament to the idea that beauty and reason are the highest virtues of a state. He was a man of the "Funeral Oration," whose eloquence defined the Western ideal of the free citizen. He represents the ruler as the Architect of Liberty, the one who builds a society where the mind is allowed to soar.