 The distinctive understanding of “politics” forged in Greece was marked by the historical emergence of the independent  city-state[1]  and the variety of regimes which it could harbor. Notwithstanding fantasies of a pre-political “Age of Kronos”, the polis was widely understood as the acme of human civilization and the principal domain in which human fulfillment could be sought. The city was the domain of potential collaboration in leading the good life, though it was by the same token the domain of potential contestation should that pursuit come to be understood as pitting some against others. Political theorizing began in arguments about what politics was good for, who could participate in politics, and why, arguments which were tools in civic battles for ideological and material control as well as attempts to provide logical or architectonic frameworks for those battles.