Page:Historical introduction to the private law of Rome (IA historicalintrod00muiriala).pdf/33



union of the Latin, Sabine, and, to a small extent, Etruscan bands that, as conquerors or conquered, old settlers or new immigrants, together constituted the first elements of the Roman people, did not necessarily involve comtemporaneous adoption of identical institutions or identical notions of law. Though descended from the same Indo-European stock, and inheriting the same primitive ideas about religion and government, yet those ideas must have been more or less modified in the course of centuries of separate and independent development. It is said that the