 The implications of the nomos-phusis contrast always depend on how the ‘natural’ is understood. Callicles looks both to international politics and to the animal world to identify what is natural rather than conventional: “both among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it [nature] shows that this is what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the inferior and have a greater share than they” (483d). He adds two examples at the level of ‘cities and races’: the invasions of Greece by the Persian Emperor Xerxes, and of Scythia by his father Darius (483d–e). He also imagines an individual within society who would exercise superiority to the full: if a man of outsize ability manages to throw off our moralistic shackles, “he would rise up and be revealed as our master, and here the justice of nature would shine forth” (484a–b). So what the justice of nature amounts to is simple: it is for the superior man to appropriate the power and possessions of the inferior (484c). Thus Callicles’ genealogy of morals, like Glaucon’s in Republic II, presents pleonexia as an eternal and universal first principle of human nature; and he goes further than either Thrasymachus or Glaucon in taking this nature as the basis for a positive norm.