He accumulates quotations, but they are inexact. He refers to Aristotle (_Polit._ vii., 10); but all Aristotle says is that men began by being hunters and shepherds; does that imply that when they became agriculturists they held the soil in common? He quotes Virgil, who in the Æneid (xi. 315) says that “the Aurunci tilled the land in common;” turn to the passage; the expression “in common” is not there; M. de Laveleye has unconsciously added it himself. Every writer does this who is under the influence of a fixed idea.[238] Speaking of Rome, he declares “that he sees a proof of primitive community in the common meals of the _curiæ_;” and he does not notice that these repasts of the _curia_ only took place on certain festivals, and that they were sacred feasts, as we are expressly told by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who witnessed them. “The _curiæ_,” he says, “with their priests, perform sacrifices and eat together on feast days.” This is not an agrarian community; it is a religious communion. Suppose that a stranger, seeing a number of good Christians communicating in our churches, declared that he saw in this a proof that the French held their land in common! A little farther we read: “The law of the Twelve Tables preserves a trace of common ownership; for in default of the _proximus agnatus_ the _gens_ is preferred to the other agnates.” There is nothing resembling this in what we have of the law of the Twelve Tables; the gens was never preferred to the agnates. Our author quotes, it is true, the following sentence, which he attributes to Gaius: _in legitimis hereditatibus successio non est: gentiles familiam habento_, which is said to be in Gaius iii., 12; but look in Gaius for this extraordinary sentence, and you certainly will not find it. Thus, alike for Greece and for Rome, M. de Laveleye has got together a number of authorities; but there is not a single quotation that is exact, or that has the meaning he attributes to it.