Title:  The Twelve Tables

Author:  Anonymous

Release Date:  January 24, 2005 [EBook #14783]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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THE TWELVE TABLES

prefaced, arranged, translated, annotated

BY P.R.  COLEMAN-NORTON

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS

INTRODUCTION

The legal history of Rome begins properly with the Twelve Tables.  It is strictly the first and the only Roman code,[1] collecting the earliest known laws of the Roman people and forming the foundation of the whole fabric of Roman Law.  Its importance lies in the fact that by its promulgation was substituted for an unwritten usage, of which the knowledge had been confined to some citizens of the community, a public and written body of laws, which were easily accessible to and strictly binding on all citizens of Rome.

Till the close of the republican period (509 B.C.-27 B.C.) the Twelve Tables were regarded as a great legal charter.  The historian Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) records:  “Even in the present immense mass of legislation, where laws are piled on laws, the Twelve Tables still form the fount of all public and private jurisprudence."[2]

This celebrated code, after its compilation by a commission of ten men (decemviri), who composed in 451 B.C. ten sections and two sections in 450 B.C., and after its ratification by the (then) principal assembly (comitia centuriata) of the State in 449 B.C., was engraved on twelve bronze[3] tablets (whence the name Twelve Tables), which were attached to the Rostra before the Curia in the Forum of Rome.  Though this important witness of the national progress probably was destroyed during the Gallic occupation of Rome in 387 B.C., yet copies must have been extant, since Cicero (106 B.C.-43 B.C.) says that in his boyhood schoolboys memorized these laws “as a required formula."[4] However, now no part of the Twelve Tables either in its original form or in its copies exists.

The surviving fragments of the Twelve Tables come from the writings of late Latin writers and fall into these four types: 

(1) Fragments which seem to contain the original words (or nearly so) of a law, “modernized” in spelling and to some extent in formation;

(2) Fragments which are fused with the context of the quoter, but which otherwise exhibit little distortion;