 De re publica was composed by Cicero between 54 and 51 BCE, a turbulent period of strife in Roman politics. Its dramatic setting is in 129 BCE during the crisis caused by Tiberius Gracchus, a consul who had championed a property redistribution law for the people and whom members of the Senate had violently suppressed as a putative threat to Roman civil order. All of it except the “Dream of Scipio” (Book VI) was lost from the Middle Ages onward; it has been reconstructed from references and excerpts in later authors, supplemented by a palimpsest of much of Books I–III discovered in 1819. Framed as a dialogue between Scipio Aemilianus, a hero of the resistance against Tiberius Gracchus and his like-minded brother, and several others of his actual contemporaries, the dialogue has a discernible structure identified by E.M. Atkins (2000: 490): Books I–II treat “the best condition of the res publica”; Books III–IV treat “justice and human nature”, topics common to the best city and the best citizen; and Books V–VI treat the “best citizen’ in discussing the statesman and in the Dream of Scipio.