 The Laws, a work reported to have been still on wax tablets, and so possibly left unfinished when Plato died (Diogenes Laertius III. 37), treats the specificity of politics as a matter not of distinct vocational expertise but of the requirements of a “second-best” (739a) city, one in which private property is allowed, as opposed to an ideal or implicitly first-best regime in which private property would be prohibited to all (thus going beyond even the ideal regime of Kallipolis in the Republic). In this section, as in most scholarly discussions, I will assume that the second-best city for which laws are laid out in the later books is the projected Cretan colony of Magnesia, of which the Cretan (Cleinias) among the dialogue’s three interlocutors has announced himself to be one of the intended founders. (For an alternative argument, that the second-best city is not meant to be Magnesia, see Bartels 2017.) In this second-best city, the legislation for which is sketched out in speech by the three interlocutors of the dialogue, politics still aims at virtue, and at the virtue of all the citizens, but those citizens all play a part in holding civic offices; the ordinary activities of politics are shared, in what is described as a mixture of monarchy and democracy. That description gives rise to an idea of the “mixed regime” or “mixed constitution” which later became influential in its own right, as we shall see below (section 6).