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Aristotle's ancient biographers adduce several reasons to explain why in the year 367 B.C. the young Stagirite, who at the time was 16 years old (or in his seventeenth year), went to Athens, or was brought there by his "guardian" Proxenus. According to one tradition, he moved there because of the advice given by the Delphic oracle. Ibn Abi Usaibia relates that, in keeping with some ancient reports, "this happened because Proxenus and Plato were close personal friends." We do not know, however, whether Usaibia's explanation is based on historical fact, nor are we able to ascertain the ultimate source of this story. Naturally, it might always be maintained that young Aristotle went to Athens in 367 B.C. for the purpose of securing the best education available in the Hellenic world, particularly, since by that year the fame of Isocrates and that of his school of rhetoric (and, judging from Pseudo-Plato, Fifth Epistle, perhaps that of the Platonic Academy) must have reached Macedonia.

Tradition has it that upon returning from his first Sicilian voyage in 388/387 B.C. Plato founded the Academy. It is also commonly held that, following the example of the Pythagorean brotherhoods with which he had come in contact in Southern Italy, he intended to make the Academy a center of philosophicor scientific studies, as well as a cult society (thiasos) dedicated to the worship of the Muses. Plutarch points out that "in his writings Plato advanced some excellent arguments concerning the laws, the government and the commonweal. But even more important is the fact that he inspired his pupils to positive political action." This suggests the further possibility, hardly ever considered, that the Academy itself was indeed a school for aspiring statesmen — perhaps the first organized "institute of political science" in the Western world.

Social or political proposals of the "ideal polity," some of which amounted to outright Utopias, came to be fairly common during the fourth and third centuries B.C. In addition to Plato's famed Republic (which is said to have been influenced in part by Hippodamus as well as by certain Pythagorean ideas) and Antisthenes' somewhat "unorthodox" social views, Diogenes of Sinope, Iambulus and Zeno the Stoic, for instance, wrote on the "ideal city." Also, a great many treatises On Kingship, which frequently were nothing more than part of that "mirror of princes literature" which can be traced back at least to Antisthenes, were authored during the same period. But it will be noticed that these relatively early Polities, including that of Zeno, uniformly advocated a small and highly articulated city-state with extremely narrow limits and relatively limited objectives rather than a pan-humanitarian or cosmopolitan ideal. The well-known Stoic cosmopolitanism, which some scholars have called the philosophic corollary of Alexander's conquest, is definitely of later date, later even than Zeno's widely known Republic, which still adheres to the confining notions of the traditional (and fateful) Greek particularism. This, in turn, compels us to distinguish between the early Zeno who in his original dependence on early Cynic teachings apparently shared in this limited outlook, and the late Zeno, who was able to conceive the whole universe as one single great city of gods and men without distinction of race or nationality. It is safe to assume, therefore, that Zeno's Republic is one of his earliest works and perhaps his earliest.