Twelve Tables (451-450 BC): The Foundation of Roman Law

The Twelve Tables were the first written code of Roman law, drafted by a board of ten men known as the decemvirs in 451–450 BC and displayed in the Forum for all to read. They were the result of a long struggle by Rome’s common citizens, the plebeians, to know and rely on the rules that governed them. Though the original tablets are lost, the code was revered as the source of all Roman law and shaped legal systems that are still in use.

Background: law in the hands of the few

In the early Roman Republic, law was largely customary and unwritten. Its interpretation rested with patrician magistrates and the pontiffs, the priests who also kept the calendar and the legal formulas. Plebeians complained that they could not know the law in advance and were exposed to arbitrary decisions, especially in matters of debt.

The First Secession of the Plebs in 494 BC had given the plebeians their own tribunes, but not equal access to justice. In 462 BC, according to Livy, the tribune Gaius Terentilius Harsa proposed a commission to set limits on the power of the consuls. The patricians resisted for years before agreeing to a written code.

Livy reports that in 454 BC three envoys were sent to Athens to study the laws of Solon and other Greek states, returning in 452 BC. Many modern historians doubt that this embassy happened as described, though Greek ideas may have reached Rome through the Greek cities of southern Italy. Written law codes had a long history in the ancient world, from the Code of Hammurabi to Draco’s laws in Athens in c. 621 BC.

The decemvirs

For 451 BC the Romans suspended the normal magistracies, including the consuls and tribunes, and elected ten men with supreme power and the task of writing the laws: the decemviri legibus scribundis. Their leading figure was the patrician Appius Claudius.

The first board produced ten tables of laws, which were displayed for public comment and then approved by the assembly. Because the work seemed incomplete, a second board of decemvirs was elected for 450 BC, again led by Appius Claudius, and it added two more tables.

The second board became a tyranny in the Roman tradition. Its members refused to step down at the end of their term, and Livy tells how Appius Claudius tried to seize a young plebeian woman, Verginia, by having a dependant falsely claim her as his slave. Her father, the centurion Lucius Verginius, killed her rather than see her dishonoured. The outrage triggered a revolt and a second secession of the plebs in 449 BC, the fall of the decemvirs and the restoration of the consuls and tribunes under the consuls Lucius Valerius Potitus and Marcus Horatius Barbatus.

What the Twelve Tables said

No complete text survives. The laws are known from quotations and summaries in later authors, including Cicero, the jurist Gaius, who wrote a commentary on them, and the writer Aulus Gellius. Modern editions arrange these fragments into twelve tables, but the order is largely a reconstruction. The language was terse, archaic Latin, often in short commands.

The first table opens with court procedure: “If he summons him to court, he is to go” (si in ius vocat, ito). Other areas covered included:

• Debt: a debtor judged liable had 30 days to pay. After that the creditor could seize him, keep him in chains and, if the debt remained unpaid, sell him “across the Tiber” into foreign slavery or put him to death. A clause about creditors “cutting shares” has been debated since antiquity.
• Family: the father of a family (paterfamilias) had wide power over his children. If a father sold his son three times, the son became free of his authority. A child with an obvious deformity was to be killed, according to Cicero’s paraphrase.
• Property: ownership could be acquired by possession for two years for land and one year for other goods (usucapio).
• Injury and crime: for a broken limb, retaliation in kind was allowed unless the parties agreed compensation. A thief caught at night could be killed. A judge who took a bribe faced death, as did anyone who sang a harmful spell or slanderous song.
• Funerals: the dead could not be buried or cremated inside the city, and lavish funeral display and women’s ritual laments of tearing the cheeks were restricted.
• Marriage: one of the last two tables banned marriage between patricians and plebeians. This was repealed by the Lex Canuleia in 445 BC.

The Tables were less a reform than a written record of existing custom. They protected property and creditors firmly, but also bound magistrates to known rules.

Display, loss and memory

According to tradition, the laws were inscribed on tablets, usually said to be of bronze, and set up in the Forum near the Rostra. They are believed to have been destroyed when the Gauls sacked Rome around 390 BC, but their text was preserved in memory and copies.

Cicero, writing in the 1st century BC, recalled that as a boy he had learned the Twelve Tables by heart as a required chant, though by his day the practice had lapsed. The historian Livy called them the source of all public and private law.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Twelve Tables were a complete law code. They did not attempt to cover all of law. They recorded rules on points that were disputed or important, especially procedure, debt and family, and assumed a background of unwritten custom that every Roman knew.

Myth: the text we read today is the original. Every modern version is a scholarly reconstruction. Some quoted wording has been modernised by later authors, and the numbering of fragments, such as “Table VIII”, was invented by editors from the 16th century onwards. The standard modern edition is in Michael Crawford’s Roman Statutes (1996).

Fact: the code was harsh but also protective. Penalties such as death for debtors and for nighttime theft seem brutal today. Yet by fixing procedures, time limits and penalties in writing, the code limited what powerful men could do to the weak, which is exactly what the plebeians had demanded.

Legacy

Roman law grew by interpretation and new statutes, but the Twelve Tables were never formally repealed. Jurists continued to comment on them, and some of their terms survived into the law of the late Empire. When the emperor Justinian compiled the Corpus Juris Civilis in the 6th century AD, he drew on a tradition that traced its roots to 451 BC.

Through Justinian’s code, rediscovered in medieval Bologna, Roman law influenced the legal systems of continental Europe, Latin America and many other countries. The ideal of law that is written, public and applicable to all citizens owes much to the plebeian demand that produced the Twelve Tables.

Timeline

• 462 BC: The tribune Terentilius Harsa proposes a commission to write down the law.
• 454 BC: Traditional embassy to Athens to study Greek laws.
• 451 BC: The first decemvirs draft ten tables of law.
• 450 BC: A second board adds two more tables.
• 449 BC: The Verginia affair; second secession of the plebs; the decemvirs fall.
• 445 BC: The Lex Canuleia permits patrician-plebeian intermarriage.
• c. 390 BC: The original tablets are thought to be destroyed in the Gallic sack.
• AD 529–534: Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis is issued.

Why it matters

The Twelve Tables marked Rome’s shift from custom known to a few to written law available to all. They became the founding document of a legal tradition that still underpins much of the world’s civil law.