 Justice, then, depended on treating equals equally, and distributing citizenship and the privileges of officeholding accordingly. Yet how should “the equal” be understood? This became the major political faultline of the Greek fifth century BCE. Oligarchical regimes might consider only the  kalokagathoi[2]  —the elite and well-born, usually also wealthy landowners —to be full equals; democratic regimes, by contrast, tended to treat the “many” (or some large proportion of them) as political equals of the elite “few,” in the fullest democracies enfranchising all free- and native-born  men.[3]  Sparta, a unique political entity, still exemplified the same broad pattern in naming its citizens “the equals” or (more literally) “the peers” (hoi  homoioi).[4]  The absence of slave status made one free but not necessarily a citizen. Slavery for its part was very little debated as a political question, serving to demarcate the domain of “politics” by contrast with it rather than being considered as a topic within it (see Garnsey 1996 for a full account including exceptions to that generalization). The exclusion of women from active citizenship in Athens was more consciously felt, giving rise to fantasies of female-dominated politics in Aristophanic comedy (Lysistrata, Assemblywomen) and to tortured reflection in many tragedies (consider the titles of Medea and Trojan Women, both Athenian works setting their explorations of women’s roles in the dramatic contexts of archaic foreign polities).