 The debate about the role of philosophy is reflected within the main body of the dialogue as well, and here it becomes if anything clearer that Cicero’s purpose is not to play down philosophy but to play up the practically oriented way of doing political philosophy that he considers appropriate to the subject. At the same time, this enables him to present his writing on the topic as genuine progress over his Greek predecessors. It may, then, come as a surprise to find, in a work of supposedly practical orientation, that prior to Scipio’s main exposition in Book 1 of the different types of political constitution, Cicero depicts a rather lengthy discussion of a cosmological event: the recent apparent sighting of a ‘second sun’ in the sky (1.15).