This chapter discusses the increasing presence of antithesis, rather than aggregation, in fifth-century Greek historiography, tragedy and vase-painting. In certain key incidents and in narrative patterns in Herodotus and Attic tragedy, we find antithesis in the form of the unity of opposites and the reversal of an apparently stable situation. This reflects the influence of mystic initiation, Pythagorean thinking (in the case of Aeschylus), and, in a broader sense, the emergence of the polis, in which social oppositions are contained within a political unit. In fifth-century Attic vase-painting and sculptural groups, there is also a progressive shift from aggregation to antithesis, paralleling the pattern found in the newly emerging genres of historiography and tragedy. This too reflects the increasing prevalence of monetary exchange and interactions within the unified framework of the polis.