 We find the etymological origins of two key terms in the title of this article, “political” and “philosophy”, in ancient Greek: the former originally pertaining to the polis or city-state; the latter being the practice of a particular kind of inquiry conceived literally as the “love of wisdom” (philosophia). These ideas were transmitted beyond the confines of the classical polis as the Greek city-states came under the suzerainty of larger kingdoms after an initial Macedonian conquest at the end of the fourth century B.C; those kingdoms in turn were eventually conquered and significantly assimilated by the Roman republic, later transmuted into an empire. Philosophers writing in Latin engaged self-consciously with the earlier and continuing traditions of writing about philosophy in Greek. Already from its origins, Greek political philosophy put the question of the forms of regimes or “constitutions” (politeia, singular) at the center of its concerns. The classification of types of constitutions already found in Herodotus, fleshed out by Plato, and further adapted by Aristotle— in Aristotle’s version, there were three “good” good regimes:monarchy, aristocracy, and a moderate form of democracy; and their three “perversions”: tyranny, oligarchy, and a bad form of democracy—would continue to inform the discussion of politics into the context of the “mixed regime” of the Roman republic, held to combine elements of all three of the good regimes. These discussions were indexed to the particular historical setting under consideration while also offering general principles that remain relevant in many ways, even as the questions and contexts for political philosophy have changed.