Twelve Tables
Duodecim Tabulae
Roman law begins with a demand that it be public and fixed on bronze, so that a plebeian could know the same law a patrician did rather than trust magistrates to remember it fairly.
- written law as a check on magistrate discretion
- plebeian pressure for legal transparency
- procedure and family law codified together
- the root of the later Roman legal tradition
Rome's earliest law code, drafted by a special commission of ten men (decemviri) after plebeian agitation for written, publicly known law rather than rules remembered and applied at the discretion of patrician magistrates. Traditionally dated to 451-450 BC and displayed on bronze tablets in the Forum, the code's ten original tables were reportedly supplemented by two more after a second commission the following year. Surviving only in later quotations and reconstructions, chiefly by Cicero and later grammarians, since the original bronze tablets were destroyed when Gauls sacked Rome around 390 BC, its terse rules on debt, property, family, and legal procedure formed the foundation that later Roman jurisprudence spent centuries interpreting and expanding, and Roman schoolchildren reportedly still memorized the text by heart well into the late Republic.
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