ANCESTRAL IMAGES
Here we see a Roman aristocrat carrying two marble portrait busts of
his ancestors. Polybius, the second century BC Greek historian, tells
us that the Romans kept wax images of their ancestors in a wooden shrine
in a conspicuous place in their house (most likely the atrium). These
wax images were death masks. The only problem was that the wax images
didn't last very long, so in the first century BC Romans began having the
wax masks copied in marble.
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