 By the time that we turn to Scipio’s exposition of the various forms of government, it can be seen that Cicero has used the flexibility of the dramatic dialogue to prime his reader to examine the topic with a critical eye. Scipio’s focus on Rome is a response to the lack of practical awareness that he (or his author) sees infecting Greek models. But if Stoic universalism is correct, such focus on a particular concrete system seems itself to be headed in the wrong direction. And if cosmology is more important than politics, yet too important for politics to ignore, then an exposition that sticks to the human realm – as Scipio’s, as far as we can tell, largely does – is missing something. Cicero thus invites us, in the midst of a work on political theory, to consider how small the human (and within that the Roman) domain is, a thought reinforced in some complex ways in the dialogue’s concluding Dream of Scipio, perhaps the most famous excerpt in all of Cicero’s philosophy (its survival owed to its coming down to us as part of a separate manuscript tradition). In thus giving the work as a whole structural integrity (despite its, for us, truncated condition), Cicero’s framing challenges the reader to maintain a critical perspective on the doing of political philosophy itself.