 Socrates seems to have been the first philosopher to treat ethics – as opposed to cosmology and physics—as a distinct area of inquiry. Asserting in Plato’s Apology (38a) that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” he pressed for definitions of the virtues or excellences which were widely recognized and claimed by his fellows, but which they found difficult to explain. As depicted by Plato, the search for such definitions led invariably to a concern with knowledge of how best to live, as not only one of the conventional virtues (in the form of wisdom) but also as underpinning, even constituting, them all. That elevation of knowledge in turn led Socrates to militate against the practices of rhetoric and judgment which animated the political institutions of Athens—the law-courts, Assembly and Council. Instead he posited the existence, or at least the possibility, of political expertise, claiming (in Plato’s Gorgias) to be the one person in Athens who at least tried to pursue such a true politikê technê, a complex notion that can be understood as meaning politics as a kind of professional expertise (Grg. 521d). The notion of political knowledge limited to one or a few experts, as opposed to the embedded and networked knowledge produced and exercised by the whole dêmos of Athens in their judgments and political roles (Ober 2008), struck at the central premises of Athenian democracy and those of Greek politics more generally (in oligarchies, wealth rather than knowledge was the relevant criterion for rule; in tyrannies, sheer power). Thus the nature of Socrates’ concern with ethics led him directly into a form of political philosophizing. The relation between politics and knowledge, the meaning of justice as a virtue, the value of the military courage which all Greek cities prized in their citizens, all seem to have been central topics of Socratic conversation.