(libertae) cannot without special permission, e gente
enubere (marry outside of the gens) or undertake any of the steps which,
together with capitis deminutio minima[25] (the loss of family rights)
would lead to a transfer of the liberta to another gens." (Lange,
Roemische Alterthuemer, Berlin, 1856, I, p. 185, where our passage from
Livy is explained by a reference to Huschke.) If this view is correct,
then the passage proves still less for the relations of free Roman
women, and there is so much less ground for speaking of their obligation
to intermarry in the gens.

The expression enuptio gentis (marriage outside of the gens) occurs only
in this single passage and is not found anywhere else in the entire
Roman literature. The word enubere (to marry outside) is found only
three times likewise in Livy, and not in reference to the gens. The
phantastic idea that Roman women had to intermarry in the gens owes its
existence only to this single passage. But it cannot be maintained. For
either the passage refers to special restrictions for freed slave women,
in which case it proves nothing for free women (ingenuae). Or it applies
also to free women, in which case it rather proves that the women as a
rule married outside of the gens and were transferred by their marriage
to their husbands' gens. This would be a point for Morgan against
Mommsen.

Almost three hundred years after the foundation of Rome the gentile
bonds were still so strong that a patrician gens, the Fabians, could
obtain permission from the senate to undertake all by itself a war
expedition against the neighboring town of Veii. Three hundred and six
Fabians are said to have marched and to have been killed from ambush.
Only one boy was left behind to propagate the gens.

Ten gentes, we said, formed a phratry, named curia. It was endowed with
more important functions than the Grecian phratry. Every curia had its
own religious rites, sacred possessions and priests. The priests of one
curia in a body formed one of the Roman clerical collegiums. Ten curiae
formed a tribe which probably had originally its own elected
chief--leader in war and high priest--like the rest of the Latin tribes.
The three tribes together formed the populus Romanus, the Roman people.

Hence nobody could belong to the Roman people, unless he was a member of
a Roman gens, and thus a member of a curia and tribe. The first
constitution of the Roman people was as follows. Public affairs were