Twelve Tables

Twelve Tables (Lat. Lex Duodecim Tabularum), the name given to the earliest code of Roman law, civil, criminal, and religious, made by the decemviri in 451-449 B.C. (A.U.C. 302-304). These, originally comprised in ten tables, to which next year two others were added, were supposed to form the basis of all Roman law, and in Cicero's time were still committed to heart by boys at school. But they were very far from being a complete system. The occasion for them arose in the constant complaints made by plebeians of oppression by patricians; and the principal aim of the twelve tables was to define rights, fix penalties, and prevent oppression under legal forms. Some of them were based on Greek models; most of them were derived from earlier Roman legislation. But laws about which there was no dispute were not included; thus they did not deal with the family, the succession, or ordinary legal procedure, and contained little of customary law. Many older laws were left intact by them, and reappear in Justinian's code. To the original tables commentaries were from time to time added. It is probable that the original bronze tablets on which the laws were written perished in the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C.; copies of them stood in the forum in the 2d century A.D. Of the text we possess only fragments edited by Schöll (1866), Voigt (1884), and Godefroy; see also Wordsworth's Fragments (1874), Ortolan's History of Roman Law (trans. 1871), and Muirhead's Historical Introduction (1886).