Appius Claudius Crassus

Appius Claudius Crassus was the dominant member of the decemvirate that wrote the Twelve Tables, and the Roman tradition made him the villain whose abuse of a plebeian girl brought the whole arrangement down. He is not Appius Claudius Caecus, the censor and road-builder, who lived a century and a half later and with whom he is easily confused. The decemvirs were ten men appointed in 451 BC with supreme power and the specific task of writing down the law, which until then had been known chiefly to patrician priests and applied by them. They produced ten tables in the first year and two more in the second, and the Twelve Tables became the foundation of Roman law for a thousand years - schoolboys were still learning them by heart in Cicero's day. The second college, under Appius, then refused to lay down office. Livy's account has him arranging for a client to claim that a girl named Verginia was his slave, so that she would pass into Appius's hands, and her father Verginius killing her in the forum rather than allow it. The army and the plebs seceded to the Aventine, the decemvirs resigned, and Appius died in prison or by his own hand. How much of this is history and how much a later story explaining why Rome distrusted extraordinary magistracies cannot be settled. The Twelve Tables themselves do not survive as a document and are known from quotations in later writers. What they contained was harsh and specific - debt bondage, the powers of a father over his household, a ban on marriage between patricians and plebeians that was repealed within five years - and the point was less their content than that they were written on bronze and set up in public where anyone could consult them. That is what the plebs had wanted. Livy's Verginia story is deliberately built to rhyme with Lucretia and the expulsion of the kings.

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