The expression enuptio gentis (marriage outside of the gens) occurs only in this single passage and is not found anywhere else in the entire Roman literature. The word enubere (to marry outside) is found only three times likewise in Livy, and not in reference to the gens. The phantastic idea that Roman women had to intermarry in the gens owes its existence only to this single passage. But it cannot be maintained. For either the passage refers to special restrictions for freed slave women, in which case it proves nothing for free women (ingenuae). Or it applies also to free women, in which case it rather proves that the women as a rule married outside of the gens and were transferred by their marriage to their husbands' gens. This would be a point for Morgan against Mommsen. Almost three hundred years after the foundation of Rome the gentile bonds were still so strong that a patrician gens, the Fabians, could obtain permission from the senate to undertake all by itself a war expedition against the neighboring town of Veii. Three hundred and six Fabians are said to have marched and to have been killed from ambush. Only one boy was left behind to propagate the gens. Ten gentes, we said, formed a phratry, named curia. It was endowed with more important functions than the Grecian phratry. Every curia had its own religious rites, sacred possessions and priests. The priests of one curia in a body formed one of the Roman clerical collegiums. Ten curiae formed a tribe which probably had originally its own elected chief--leader in war and high priest--like the rest of the Latin tribes. The three tribes together formed the populus Romanus, the Roman people.