In modern historiography, ancient Rome encompasses the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC, the Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic, Roman Empire, and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.
The Capitoline Wolf, now illustrating the legend that a she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus after their mother's imprisonment in Alba Longa
Etruscan painting of dancer and musicians from the Tomb of the Leopards in Tarquinia
The Capitoline Brutus, a bust traditionally identified as L. Junius Brutus, one of the founders of the Republic
The Roman siege of the Celtiberian stronghold of Numantia in Spain in 133 BC
Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques of research, and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of documentary sources. Scholars discuss historiography by topic — the historiography of the United Kingdom, of WWII, of the pre-Columbian Americas, of early Islam, and of China — and different approaches to the work and the genres of history, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the development of academic history produced a great corpus of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties — such as to their nation state — remains a debated question.
The Allegory On the Writing of History shows Truth watching the historian write history, while advised by Wisdom. (Jacob de Wit,1754)
Reproduction of part of a tenth-century copy of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War
Bust of Thucydides, Hellenistic copy of a 4th-century BC work
The Roman bust of historian Cato the Elder