 In the Republic, a work which unfortunately has not come down to us complete (none of its six books survive whole, with large portions missing especially from the last four), Cicero stakes out his position early with an attack on philosophers who argue that one should refrain from public affairs – he means principally Epicureans. The Stoics, in offering a more activist model, present the alternative view. The Stoic philosopher Panaetius, together with the Greek historian Polybius, is named in the main body of the dialogue as having discussed political matters with one of the work’s principal speakers, Scipio (1.34); and the influence of Stoic political thinking is evident in the idea that humans share with gods dominion not just of the place in which they happen to live, but of the Earth and indeed the whole universe (1.19). Yet this cosmopolitan outlook in turn creates tension with the idea, also prominent in the dialogue, of the specialness of Rome, and raises the question of whether Roman exceptionalism can sit comfortably with a view of human beings as citizens of the world.