property. As for the woman and her relation to the gens of her husband, it is he who by an act of his own free will—the marriage—introduced her into his gens. Therefore it seems quite natural that he should be the proper person to authorize her to leave this gens by another marriage. In short, the matter appears simple and obvious, as soon as we discard the absurd conception of an endogamous Roman gens and accept Morgan's originally exogamous gens.
There is still another view which has probably found the greatest number of advocates. According to them the passage in Livy only means "that freed slave girls (libertae) cannot without special permission, e gente enubere (marry outside of the gens) or undertake any of the steps which, together with capitis deminutio minima25 (the loss of family rights) would lead to a transfer of the liberta to another gens." (Lange, Römische Alterthümer, 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