Cicero always borrowed largely, or rather, whose materials he made
fairly his own by the skill, richness, and beauty of his elaboration,
Some passages of this treatise were evidently suggested by Plato; and
Aulus Gellius says that Cicero made no little use of a now lost essay of
Theophrastus on Friendship.

In this work I am especially impressed by Cicero's dramatic power. But
for the mediocrity of his poetic genius, he might have won pre-eminent
honor from the Muse of Tragedy. He here so thoroughly enters into the
feelings of Laelius with reference to Scipio's death, that as we read we
forget that it is not Laelius himself who is speaking. We find ourselves
in close sympathy with him, as if he were telling us the story of his
bereavement, giving utterance to his manly fortitude and resignation and
portraying his friend's virtues from the unfading image phototyped on
his own loving memory. In other matters too Cicero goes back to the time
of Laelius and assumes his point of view assigning to him just the
degree of foresight which he probably possessed and making not the
slightest reference to the very different aspect in which he himself had
learned to regard and was wont to represent the personages and events of
that earlier period. Thus while Cicero traced the downfall of the
republic to changes in the body politic that had taken place or were
imminent and inevitable when Scipio died he makes Laelius perceive only
a slight though threatening deflection from what had been in the earlier
time [Footnote 1]. So too though Cicero was annoyed more than by almost
any other characteristic of his age by the prevalence of the Epicurean
philosophy and ascribed to it in a very large degree the demoralization
of men in public life with Laelius the doctrines of this school are
represented as they must have been in fact as new and unfamiliar. In
time Laelius is here made to say not a word which he being the man that
he was and at the date assumed for this dialogue might not have said