The Twelve Tables

Summary

The Twelve Tables were the first written law of Rome. According to Roman historians, the common people, the plebeians, complained that the patrician magistrates who judged cases kept the law secret and applied it as they pleased. After years of struggle the Republic suspended its regular magistrates and appointed a board of ten men, the decemviri, to write the laws down. They produced ten tables in 451 BC and two more in 450 BC. The laws were engraved, probably on bronze or wood, and set up in the Forum, where every citizen could read them. The original tablets were lost, perhaps when the Gauls sacked Rome around 390 BC. What survives are fragments quoted or paraphrased by later Roman writers such as Cicero, Livy, Gellius and the jurists collected in Justinian's Digest. Modern scholars have arranged these fragments into twelve tables, but the order and wording are reconstructions. The surviving rules are short, blunt commands written in archaic Latin. They begin with procedure: a man summoned to court must go, and the plaintiff may seize him if he refuses. Other tables deal with debt, including the harsh treatment of a debtor who could not pay; the power of the father over his household; guardianship and inheritance; property and boundaries; injuries and theft, including the right to kill a thief who comes by night; and public law, such as the rule that no law may be passed against a single individual and that a citizen may be sentenced to death only by the greatest assembly. The tenth table limited the expense of funerals and forbade burial or cremation inside the city. One law of the later tables forbade marriage between patricians and plebeians; it was repealed a few years later. The Tables were the foundation of Roman law for centuries. Cicero recalled that boys of his generation learned them by heart at school. Although later Roman law grew far beyond them, they remained a symbol of law that is public, fixed and equal for every citizen, an ideal that passed through Justinian's codification into the legal tradition of Europe.

Top Lessons

• Law that all can read

  The Twelve Tables were set up in public so that ordinary citizens could know the law. Written, public law protects people from arbitrary rulers.

• Learning the law by heart

  Roman boys memorized the Tables. Memory work can root a people's laws and values in each generation.

• Reconstructing the past

  The Tables survive only as fragments in later writers. Historians must be careful about what is known and what is reconstructed.

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