The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Twelve Tables, by Anonymous

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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