 Because the field of political philosophy so delineated has had a long history since then, long past the time when the ancient models were accepted as defining the field and determining the “problems” to be considered, it is a mistake to approach their thought with a modern menu of expectations of what the subject will contain. At the same time, because the Greeks also developed other genres widely recognized today—among them, history, tragedy, comedy, and rhetoric—no understanding of their thought about politics can restrict itself to the genre of political philosophy alone. Some argue, for example, that Thucydides’ elaboration of the nature of the political through his History of the fifth-century Peloponnesian War between leagues led by Athens and Sparta is more important and instructive than that issuing from Plato’s philosophical dialogues (Geuss 2005). While that argument is contentious, it rests on an important broader point. “Politics” and what is “political” emerged as part of a widespread set of sociolinguistic practices, most notably and best documented in Athens, while “philosophy” was invented by a relatively small number of self-professed “philosophical” thinkers. Thus the invention of “political philosophy” as a genre can be understood as a deliberate challenge to existing practices, and conceptions, of “the political.” The challenge was directed in particular, though not exclusively, to democratic practices in mid to late fifth century Athens, which was the polis both intellectually dominant and in many ways politically exemplary at the time, as well as bequeathing the lion’s share of our surviving evidence from ancient Greece (Meier 1990, Ober 2008; on the surviving evidence for ancient Greek philosophy in general, see the entry on  doxography for ancient philosophy).