Unlike his previous work De re publica, in which Cicero felt compelled to set the action in the times of Scipio Africanus Minor, Cicero wrote this work as a fictionalized dialogue between himself, his brother Quintus, and their mutual friend Titus Pomponius Atticus.

Cicero's basic conservative and traditionalist beliefs led him to imagine an idealized Rome before the Gracchi, with the classes still in harmony.

However, less than a decade after the accepted date for his beginning the manuscript, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, launching the civil war that would end the Republic.

The trio discuss the porous border between fact and fable in the writing of ancient Roman and Greek historians.

Cicero indicates that many of the stories of the Roman kings, such as Numa Pompilius conversing with the nymph Egeria, were regarded as fables or parables, not accurate records of real incidents.

Atticus flatters Cicero by arguing he was one of the best qualified men in Rome to write that history, given he had identified numerous flaws in the works of previous Roman historians.

Cicero and Atticus discuss whether a person can be patriotic for both their country and the region they come from within it: i.e. can someone be devoted to both Rome and Arpinum at the same time?

A human law enacted for a temporary or local purpose has force only if the public observe it and the state enforces it.

Among the things acknowledged in this section are the fact that at times religious laws have both a spiritual and a pragmatic purpose, as Cicero, when quoting the laws of the Twelve Tables and their injunction against burial or cremation within the pomerium, admits that the injunction is as much to appease fate (by not burying the dead where the living dwell) as it is to avoid calamity (by lessening the risk of fire in the city due to open-pyre cremation).

However, the work could have been composed before, during or after the dictatorship of Julius Caesar (45-44 BC) which fatally undermined the constitution of the Roman Republic.

Vienna Professor M. Zelzer in 1981 argued that the text as it is now known may have been transcribed out of a cursive (as opposed to block-text) copy at some point, incurring possible mistakes from the vagaries of the script.

Others (such as translator Niall Rudd) argue that the text was still in rough-draft form at the time of Cicero's murder in December 43 BC, and that it was still to be cleaned up and edited by the author.