De re publica

De re publica (On the Republic; see below) is a dialogue on Roman politics by Cicero, written in six books between 54 and 51 BC.

By employing various speakers to raise differing opinions, Cicero not only remained true to his favoured sceptical method of setting opposing arguments against one another (see, e.g., Carneades), but also made it more difficult for his adversaries to take him to task for what he had written.

In alphabetical order: As a letter to his brother Quintus (dated to November 54 BC) shows, Cicero very nearly redrafted the entire work so as to replace these characters with himself and his friends.

[2] Cicero was convinced by Sallustius' arguments, and he makes clear in the letter to Quintus that he intended to carry out this redraft.

[5] Cicero tried to emulate speech of the dialogue's participants by reconstructing several aspects of spoken language of the Scipionic age.

[6] The treatise has other stylistic features: a large number of antitheses compared to other philosophical works and elements of archaic grammar, still in use in official language, but completely outmoded in public speeches.

The Somnium Scipionis, as it is known, survives because it was the subject of a commentary by Macrobius, who excerpted large portions; both he and his readers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were mainly interested in its discussion of astrology and astronomy, especially given the loss of the rest of the book.

The largest part of the surviving text was uncovered as a palimpsest in 1819 in a Vatican Library manuscript (Vat Lat 5757) of a work by Augustine and published in 1822.

The discovery in 1819 by Cardinal Angelo Mai was one of the first major recoveries of an ancient text from a palimpsest, and although Mai's techniques were crude by comparison with later scholars', his discovery of De Republica heralded a new era of rediscovery and inspired him and other scholars of his time to seek more palimpsests.

A copy was published in the 19th century by the Vatican Library, and a transcript is available in the 1908 Supplementary Proceedings of the American School of Rome.

Uncertainty continues over several corruptions in the text that affect key data, such as the structure and size of the Comitia Centuriata in early Rome as described by Scipio in Book II.