[563] See Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, p. 135.
[564] On the religious character of confarreatio see De Marchi, La Religione nella vita privata, i. p. 145 foll.
[565] Cic. de Domo, 12. 14; Gellius, v. 19.
[566] See, e.g. Launspach, State and Family in Early Rome, p. 256 foll. The last three chapters of this little book, on Patria potestas, Marriage, and Succession, will be found useful by those who cannot enter into the many disputes and difficulties which have arisen out of the attempts of writers on Roman law to adjust legal ideas to the dim early history of Rome. Binder, in his work Die Plebs, starts from the improbable hypothesis that the plebs was the population of the Latin part of the city as distinct from that Sabine part on the Quirinal, which he believes to have been the only patrician body; and he further believes that the plebs lived originally under "Mutterrecht," the patres under "Vaterrecht." Such a condition of society would, of course, have greatly added to the pontifical work of religious adjustment; it would have been more than even the pontifices could have successfully achieved.
[567] See above, note 7. Binder, Die Plebs, p. 488 foll., discusses, and in the main rejects, the arguments of Pais and Lambert.
[568] So Huvelin, in a paper in L'Année sociologique, 1905-6, p. 1 foll., criticised by Hubert et Mauss, Mélanges d'histoire des religions, p. xxiii. foll.
[569] From the religious point of view the legis actiones are best explained in Marquardt, 318 foll. Cp. Muirhead, Roman Law, ed. 1899, pp. 246-7; Greenidge, Roman Public Life, index s.v. "legis actio," and especially p. 87.
[570] The famous passage of Pomponius is in the Digest, i. 2. 2, sec. 6 (for the work of Aelius, see Dig. i. 2. 2, 38) "ex his legibus ... actiones compositae sunt, quibus inter se homines disceptarent: quas actiones ne populus prout vellet institueret, certas sollemnesque esse voluerunt.... Omnium tamen harum et interpretandi scientia et actiones apud collegium pontificum erant, ex quibus constituebatur, quis quoquo anno praeesset privatis."
[571] Livy ix. 46 "civile ius, repositum in penetralibus pontificum, evulgavit (Cn. Flavius), fastosque circa forum in albo proponit, ut quando lege agi posset sciretur." Cp. Val. Max. ii. 5. 2. Civile ius is here usually taken as meaning the procedure; but this is a passage which may give some countenance to those who would put the publication of the XII. Tables later than the traditional date.
[572] For the relation of the Flamines, Vestals, and Rex sacrorum to the pontifex maximus, see Wissowa, R.K. 432 foll.