Note 39 — XI THE LAW OF NATURE

The word gens, though we commonly translate it ‘nation,’ was originally used to denote a clan or sept (e.g. Fabii, Julii), and always retained this as one of its meanings. Can this original sense have had anything to do with the earliest legal meaning of the term? One is tempted to conjecture that there might have been a sort of common law of the gentes, recognized in contradistinction to the law of each gens, but when we find the term in the time of Cicero, it has the sense mentioned in the text, and I do not know of any facts supporting such a conjecture. So far back as one can go ius quiritium is the term applied to the law of the city as a whole.