It seems to have made Cicero so uncomfortable that, in his own account of Rome’s origin in On the State, he does not mention it: Remus appears at the start, to be exposed with Romulus, but then just fades out of the tale. Another writer – the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a resident of Rome in the first century BCE but usually called after his home town on the coast of modern Turkey – chose to depict Romulus as inconsolable at the death of Remus (‘he lost the will to live’).
