Genre and Fact in the Preface to Cicero's De Amicitia

Over 250 years ago, the Cambridge clergyman Conyers Middleton, one of the first biographers of Cicero in the English language, said of the Laelius De Amicitia, 'this agreeable book ... must needs affect us more warmly when it is found at last to be a history, or a picture drawn from the life, exhibiting the real characters and sentiments of the best and greatest men of Rome.' Middleton thus accepted at face value Cicero's claims in the preface to his treatise on friendship that he has reproduced, in some form, an actual conversation that took place in 129 BCE between C. Laelius and his sons-in-law C. Fannius and Q. Mucius Scaevola