Page:A history and description of Roman political institutions (IA historyanddescri00abbo).pdf/24



14. Sources of Information. The same difficulties which beset one's path in seeking to trace the course of political events during the regal period bring to naught in some respects every effort to gain a clear conception of the political institutions of the epoch in question. Our knowledge of these institutions is derived in the main from tradition, from the explanatory statements of Latin writers, and from an investigation of the political institutions of the republican period. Some further light is thrown on early institutions by an investigation of early laws, treaties, legal and religious formulae, and by a study of the fundamental meaning of the titles of several offices, as in the case of the quaestores parricidii.

Let us confine our attention for the present to the three principal sources, noting at the outset some of the points at which these sources must be used with caution. Many of the descriptions which we find in Livy of the Roman constitution under the Kings owe their existence to a deliberate attempt at a later date to account for a political term or usage or institution, which in course of time had lost original meaning. This same inventive tendency vitiates in some measure the explanations made by the later antiquarians, whose views are also more or less colored by their