States, empires, and their rulers are surely not the whole story of the human past, although historians have sometimes treated them as though they were. But they are important because their actions shaped the lives of many millions of people. The city-states of ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the emerging Chinese empire of the Qin dynasty, and the Indian empire of the Mauryan dynasty—these were among the impressive political structures of the second-wave era in Eurasia. Rulers seeking to establish or maintain their authority mobilized a variety of ideas to give legitimacy to their regimes. Reflection on political authority was a central issue in the discourse of educated people all across Eurasia. In the documents that follow, four contemporary observers—two rulers and two scholars—describe some of the political arrangements within Mediterranean, Chinese, and Indian civilizations. Keep in mind that each of them represents an idealized image of political authority rather than an “objective” discussion of how these political systems actually operated.