 At the same time, politics was shaped by the legacy of archaic poetry and its heroic ethos and by the religious cults which included, alongside pan-Hellenic and familial rites, important practices distinct to each city-state. This was a polytheistic, rather than monotheistic, setting, in which religion was at least in large part a function of civic identity. It was a world innocent of modern bureaucracy and of the modern move to intellectual abstraction in defining the state: the entity we would call “Athens” in the abstract was called in its own day by the collective noun for its living and breathing citizens, “the Athenians.” So if ancient political philosophy left out much that modern political philosophy would include (e.g., for the most part, the question of the justness of slavery), it also included much that the latter would tend to exclude. Not only the civic religious cult, but also the patterns of child-rearing, cultural stories expressed in music, epic, and drama, gender roles and sexual practices, military participation, and so on, were features of the “way of life” which constituted the politeia or “constitution” in its broadest sense (Lane 2014a, 59–62). This broadest sense was initially most evident to the Athenians when they looked at the peculiar customs of Sparta, but Plato taught them to recognize that democratic Athens was as distinctive a regime (Schofield 2006: 31–43), one embodying a particular set of ethical goals and practices in its political arrangements.