version of recent conflicts was a useful adjunct to foreign policy. So was publicity about the nature and antiquity of the city. About
this time a friend of Rome in Chios set up an inscription showing the genealogy of Romulus and Remus-interestingly, it was Fabius
Pictor who first seems to have reconciled the Greek view that Aeneas had founded Rome with the Roman view that it was Romulus.
At home the historians not only followed the poets in glorifying Roman virtues, but educated in another -way by establishing the
'truth' about the Roman constitution and mores, so as to preserve these from erosion in a time of increasing foreign influence and one
when many new families were reaching high office. Roman historiography was thus at the start essentially conservative in outlook.
Statue Of A Roman With The Busts Of His Ancestors (late first century B.C.). The practice of mourners in funeral processions
wearing masks to personate dead ancestors, as recorded by Polybius, tended to give way during the late Republic to the carrying of
portrait-busts, presumably in a light material such as wax or terracotta.
Other senators followed Fabius and Cincius, the most noteworthy among them being the ex-consul and censor M. Porcius Cato from
the town of Tusculum in Latium. Cato wrote his Origines in Latin. As the work's title suggests, he was concerned with the early
history, not only of Rome, but of other Italian cities; but he then moved swiftly on to discuss the Punic Wars and his own lifetime
(234-149 B.C.), enlivening the narrative with digressions on marvels, as Herodotus had done, and also versions of his own speeches.
From Cato's time onwards Romans usually wrote their history in Latin, but they were still subject to Greek influences, of which
three may be distinguished.
Polybius