Book excerpt: Three Traditions of Greek Political Thought: Plato in Dialogue is an analysis of the emergence of Western philosophical and political thought in archaic and classical Greece. With particular focus on Plato, this book is an in-depth study of the contentious dialogue in classical political philosophy. In the late archaic and classical periods, two major traditions of philosophical and political thought developed. One tradition was associated with the Presocratic mechanistic materialistic philosophers and the Sophists. The second tradition, beginning with Pythagoras, gained full expression in the collected dialogues of Plato. Both of these philosophic traditions challenged the long established Greek mythico/religious tradition associated with Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and others. This study examines the dynamic dialogue involving these three traditions, which present competing and conflicting world views. It concludes that Plato's dialogues, taken together, quintessentially embody the mainstream dialogue or trialogue, as it could be called, in Greek political thought. This book also makes the case that the three major traditions of Greek political thought set the stage for the future dialogue of Western political philosophy even to this day.