De re publica (Latin: On the commonwealth, see below) is a dialogue on Roman politics by Cicero, written in six books between 54 and 51 BC. It is written in the format of a Socratic dialogue in which Scipio Africanus Minor (who had died a few decades before Cicero was born, several centuries after Socrates' death) takes the role of a wise old man -- an obligatory part for the genre. Cicero's treatise was politically controversial: by choosing the format of a philosophical dialogue he avoided naming his political adversaries directly. Cicero employed various speakers to raise differing opinions in an attempt to make it more difficult for these adversaries to take him to task on what he had written.