Law of the Twelve Tables
Rome published its law on twelve bronze tablets in the Forum around 450 BC, and the act mattered more than the content. Until then the law was unwritten, known only to the patrician pontiffs who interpreted it, and applied by patrician magistrates. A plebeian in a dispute could not find out what the rule was, which is the grievance the tribunes pressed for years. A commission of ten men, the decemviri, was appointed in 451 BC with full powers to codify it, suspending the ordinary magistracies. They produced ten tables in the first year and two more in the second — and then refused to leave office. Appius Claudius, the dominant decemvir, is said to have attempted to have a plebeian girl named Verginia declared a slave so that he could take her, and her father killed her in the Forum rather than let it happen. The story parallels Lucretia's too neatly to be trusted, and the second secession of the plebs that followed appears to be real. The content is not a constitution. It is procedure, family law, debt, property, inheritance and torts, in language of brutal economy — a father may sell his son three times; if a man has broken another's limb and there is no settlement, let there be retaliation in kind; a creditor may cut the debtor's body in pieces. The tables were destroyed when the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC and survive in quotations. Roman schoolboys memorised them for four centuries. Cicero says he learned them by heart as a boy, and complains that the practice had lapsed in his own day.
- Category: Political
