It was rather Homer who started the whole thing: Socrates/Plato was kind of Homer’s Machiavelli in the history of philosophy. My “Tutorial in Platonic Political Philosophy” is still roughly accurate (though I now understand considerably more about Alfarabi, Maimonides et al. and, ironically, about the Counter-Enlightenment—Romanticism, Pragmatism, Existentialism, Post-structuralism, Postmodernism, etc.):
‘[O]riginally, Socrates was no political philosopher but a natural philosopher, like Thales of Miletus. This is the Socrates who is sharply criticised by the oldest of our three direct sources, the great comic poet Aristophanes. In his comedy, The Clouds, Aristophanes depicts Socrates as a sophist, a scientist of the Greek enlightenment. About this enlightenment, Lampert writes (in his forelast book): “it actively schooled the best Athenian young in a lightly veiled skepticism about the gods while mocking ancestral or paternal submission to them and counseling its students on just how to make the best use of the piety of others.” This is precisely Aristophanes’ reproach of Socrates, and in fact Socrates, from that time on, begins his so-called “second sailing”. His first sailing was his journey into the clouds, that is to say, his quest for the true nature, or true cause, of natural phenomena. His second sailing is his return journey, his return to the earth, to the world of men.’
https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/t/a-tutorial-in-platonic-political-philosophy/45536/1