no less than her husband could have given her, but what they do give is an absolute right, independent of all limitations, so that, if she should make use of it, her new husband shall not suffer in consequence. The senate even instructs the present and future consuls and praetors to see that no inconvenience arise to her from the use of this right. Mommsen's supposition is therefore absolutely inadmissible.
Then again: suppose a woman married a man from another gens, but remained in her own gens. According to the passage quoted above, her husband would then have had the right to permit his wife to marry outside of her own gens. That is, he would have had the right to make provisions in regard to the affairs of a gens to which he did not belong at all. The thing is so utterly unreasonable that we need not lose any words about it.
Nothing remains but to assume that the woman in her first marriage wedded a man from another gens and thereby became a member of her husband's gens. Mommsen admits this for such cases. Then the whole matter at once explains itself. The woman, torn away from her old gens by her marriage and adopted into the gentile group of her husband, occupies a peculiar position in the new gens. She is now a gentile, but not a kin by blood. The manner of her entrance from the outset excludes all prohibition of intermarrying in the gens, into which she has come by marriage. She is adopted into the family relations of the gens and inherits some of the property of her husband when he dies, the property of a gentile. What is more natural than that this property should remain in the gens and that she should be obliged to marry a gentile of her husband and no other? If, however, an exception is to be made, who is so well entitled to authorize her as her first husband who bequeathed his property to her? At the moment when he bequeathes on her a part of his property and simultaneously gives her permission to transfer this property by marriage or as a result of marriage to a strange gens, he still is the owner of this property, hence he literally disposes of his personal