Another source of information concerning the earliest Roman history are the _Commentarii Pontificum_. They were a collection of law cases from the old public and ceremonial law, together with the decisions of the pontiffs in cases which came under their jurisdiction, similar to the decisions of the lawyers in the pandects. This mass was the groundwork from which those who studied the laws deduced the general principles. The Sunnah, which is the Mahomedan code of law, and the Talmud are quite corresponding to it in form. An abstract principle is never laid down: there is nothing but an enumeration of decisions in particular cases. We find the same in the Pentateuch in the discussions concerning the inheritance of females. With reference to the case of _judicium perduellionis_, it is stated how Horatius had slain his sister. But the groundwork of those books is nevertheless made at a different time from that which is given out in it. What we know must date from a later time, indeed still a very remote one for us, anterior to the rise of Roman historical writing, yet not so old as they themselves would have us believe. The same was the case with the _Libri Pontificum_ and _Libri Augurales_. From them the historians quote the declarations of war in that definite formula which Ancus is said first to have introduced. The forms of surrender, the formula _fœderis feriendi_, the appeals to the people, were according to Cicero likewise entered in them. From these books history has been enriched as much as if they had contained authentic historical facts. Another source of the annalists were the _laudationes funebres_, spoken of by Livy and by Cicero in Brutus, from which latter it comes out, that very old specimens, dating as far back as from the times before the war of Pyrrhus, were in existence. They were kept in the Atrium, near the images of the ancestors (_imagines_). They were speeches in commemoration of a deceased person, delivered in the forum by the nearest kinsman, at first quite simple and unpretending. According to Cicero, they always returned to the family and the ancestors, that is to say, the descent of the deceased was traced from the first fathers of the race. But Cicero and Livy both complain of the falsifications which crept from these panegyrics into Roman history. The Romans, in fact, notwithstanding all the veracity which they otherwise possessed, had an extraordinary vanity with regard to political and family relations, deeming themselves bound in duty to extol their state and their families. For this reason forged victories and triumphs are contained in those _laudationes_.